Microsoft Immersive Reader

“How can I create an interactive choice board with a popular content curation tool?” You could use any tool to make it, but why not give Wakelet a try? Wakelet offers support for a simple grid (two items side by side, stacked as many deep as you would like). While it’s not the traditional nine by nine grid, putting your choice board on Wakelet has a few advantages. In this blog entry, we’ll discuss traditional choice boards and you will see how Wakelet can expand student learning opportunities.

What Is a Choice Board?

“Always revisit what something is before you change it,” said Mr. Juraxek, a past writing teacher. “Remind them of the rule before you break it.” Before we transform choice boards, let’s review what they are.

A choice board is a graphic organizer. It allows students to choose different ways to learn about a particular concept. Choice boards are set up in a grid….You can include more or fewer activities (source: Cassidy Reinken).

One challenge choice board makers encounter is creating activities. How can you develop activities so that you don’t spend hours putting one together? Let’s explore that.

How Can I Craft Choice Board Activities Fast?

The trick to choice boards is matching student learning objectives to fun, interactive tasks. These tasks have to extend learning. As a writing workshop proponent, I thought my choice board should focus on dialogue. One way to map out my choice board involves outlining it up front, as shown below.

As someone who taught writing in sixth grade, teaching dialogue was one of my favorite activities. Many students don’t know how to write dialogue because writing dialogue that develops the story, as required in Chapter 110. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading can be difficult. For fun, I’ve tried to use resources in my choice board that are simple.

What Are the Benefits of a Wakelet Choice Board?

Since I’m planning to make this choice board into a Wakelet, note that each activity has a picture or video with it. To keep it simple, I will only show the three rows of activities. That’s enough to get the concept across to you.

The main benefits of using Wakelet for your choice board organizer include:

Escape the tyranny of the nine-by-nine grid or table
Use an interactive tool that works on any device, including mobile
Craft shorter choice boards
Embed video, images, web links, and G Suite docs easily
Save your Wakelet choice board as a series of activities or as an amazing Adobe portable document format (PDF)
Rely on Microsoft’s Immersive Reader to read embedded text aloud

As you can see, there are many benefits to using Wakelet as a visual organizer for your choice board. If you’re not sure how to use Wakelet, you may want to read my blog entry Twitter Takeaways: Wakelet for Content Curation to learn everything you need.

Wakelet Choice Board: Give Your Writing a Voice

wakelet choice board

Activity #1: Where do you put the quotation marks?

Task: Give characters in your writing a voice. Learn where to put the quotation marks when using dialogue in your writing.
Activity: Watch this video and then listen to family and friends. Listen to them speak, then make what they said into a quote poster.
Technology Tool: Create a quote poster.

Activity #2: How do you capture a character’s thoughts and feelings?

Task: Quotes can help you reflect the inner thoughts and feelings people have. Learn how to add dialogue to a story.
Activity: Watch this video to see two types of story, without and with dialogue. Add dialogue to “Peggy and the Prince” story in this Google Doc.
Technology Connection: Google Docs
Note the story above was adapted from this Funny Stories website.

Activity #3: Are you using dialogue tags right?

Task: Use dialogue tags to spice up how your characters speak. Think of them as adverbs that describe an action verb. In this case, dialogue tags describe how someone said something.
Activity: Watch this video on dialogue tags. Revise this story to reflect dialogue tags.
Technology Connection: Google Docs

See one example of a Wakelet choice board.

This is one way to use Wakelet to create an interactive visual organizer of activities. While a Wakelet choice board moves away from the traditional choice board, it gives you more control. More importantly, it increases student access and accessibility. Give it a try!

There are two common challenges we face as educators, no matter what you do. Classroom teacher, school administrator, or instructional coach — you face these same two challenges.

The first challenge is how to archive your Twitter chats. Imagine being able to capture Twitter hashtags featuring classroom critical information. Instead of losing information to the continuous scroll, how can we save it? Or how about curating content for a campus show-and-tell?

The second challenge is how to set up a safe space for backchannel chats. Providing the ability for your students or your staff to share ideas and thoughts is a powerful learning tool.

In this blog entry, we’ll explore both of these aspects of Wakelet that you may be unfamiliar with. Ready? Let’s get started.

Did You Know?

You can now save Flipgrid videos direct into a Wakelet Collection! The Wakelet developers have integrated Flipgrid’s new Shorts Camera into Wakelet to help bring your stories to life! Learn more via this tweet. (Updated 9/4/2019)

Wakelet for Backchannel Chats

“Wouldn’t it be neat if we had a tool that worked well for backchannel chats?” I remember asking the question a few months ago when Today’s Meet went offline. In spite of my best search efforts, I couldn’t find any solutions that worked well. I ended up settling for Padlet’s backchannel, but it feels clunky and not worth the effort of setting up. The good news is that Wakelet makes it easy with its access code feature.

Step 1: Create Your Wakelet

You can add some descriptive text and include a short link. You must use the one Wakelet provides, but you can also make your own with a URL shortener. You can see this “Class Academic Chat” Wakelet online here.

Step 2: Set the Visibility

Set the visibility of your Wakelet to unlisted, as shown in the image below.

Step 3: Get the Contributors’ link or Code

Once you have your Wakelet ready to share, get the Contributors’ link. This link includes a special code you can share with others. This link, which is also available as a QR code, makes it easy to get your K-12 or adult learners into your class chat.

Note: If you are logged into Wakelet via your browser, you will not see the ENTER CODE. To get around that, either 1) log out of Wakelet, or 2) open an incognito/private browsing window. Also, if at any time you need to generate a new link and code (like I will with this particular chat), you can use the link shown.

Step 4: Invite Others

Instruct others to enter the code for your Wakelet, then enter their name, as shown below. If you are in an environment where sharing the link is difficult, ask learners to open up their browser. Then, have them go to the Wakelet.com page. At this point, have them click on ENTER CODE in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Once learners click on ENTER CODE (as shown above), then they can enter the top secret access code that makes them into contributors, as shown below.

After selecting the JOIN button, then they will be invited to enter their name as shown below.

At that point, they are ready to begin adding content to the Wakelet Class Chat.

Step 5: Ask for Participation

Once your learners are in the Wakelet chat, they can click on the plus symbol. Each contribution displays the student’s name or the one they entered. Here’s what the add content bar looks like.

The plus symbol will empower them to do any of the following:

Paste URL – You can ask students to replace the text imported from the website by having them enter their own rationale for adding the site or why it is relevant to the conversation.
Text – Add text or contributions
Image – Add an image
PDF – If learners have a PDF document on their device, they can add it.
Drive – Add content from Google Drive.

Isn’t that incredible? When done adding content, participants SAVE AND EXIT. This commits their changes to the class Wakelet, making them visible for all to see. If they want to add new comments, they can click on EDIT COLLECTION. This will let them add more remarks before they SAVE AND EXIT again. They can also choose to CLOSE out without making additions.

Now, one other neat feature is possible. Participants have the ability to add content, but cannot make changes. That is, they are unable to change the background images, the display of the Wakelet itself. Only you can do that as the organizer or teacher.

Tip: Once the content is in Wakelet, don’t forget that every text entry has the power of Microsoft’s Immersive Reader behind it. Yes, that means that text can be read aloud to students who need it.

Want to see it all in action? Watch this short YouTube video tutorial (alternate link) I made for you.

Curating Twitter Chats and Tweets

This aspect of Wakelet slipped past me at first. While I knew Wakelet had the ability to embed tweets into its flow as bookmarks, there’s more to it. As an instructional coach or facilitator, you need to curate content for K-12 or adult learners. And that content should include resources and ideas from the Twitterverse.

Capturing tweets is difficult, but Wakelet makes it easy. As you can see in the two images below, click the plus symbol and then the TWITTER button. Note that this content bar is different than what you see as a contributor when participating in a chat. You have MORE options available to you.

After that, you can add tweets from a particular hashtag or user. In the image below, you can see that one can multi-select tweets from a hashtag, in this case, #pblchat.

Wakelet to the Rescue

As you can imagine, Wakelet makes powerful options available to you. I hope you will find these two features worthwhile. I had not explored them until a recent conversation with Wakelet’s Misbah (@Wakelet). What a joy to learn about such awesome, free (no-cost) tools for educators. In addition to creating content-rich collections of curated goodness, you can use Wakelet for much more. Stay tuned as we continue our exploration.

Bonus Tip: Embed Content

Want to share your backchannel chat or twitter curation efforts on another website? Wakelet embeds easily into Microsoft OneNote, Google Sites pages, Google’s Blogger, and traditional websites. This makes it the perfect tool for capturing student insights and sharing. You can embed content by using the embed code Wakelet provides. Misbah also points out that you can print the QR codes to existing collections and then paste them into books, magazines, or around your campus to give people MORE information.

But wait, there’s more! Did you know that you can save Screencastify video recordings direct to Wakelet? Yes, it is easy to take those screencasts and drop them right into your favorite Wakelet through the Apps feature. Here’s a video overview of the options available:

*This post was updated September 4, 2019.

Wakelet Choice Boards