Looking for a safe way to share YouTube videos with your students? Instructional coach Angela Westmoreland, M.Ed. explains why Wakelet is her top pick
Videos are a critical part of instruction in the 21st century classroom. From lyrical or rap videos to battle reproductions, relevant video selections can enhance our learners’ understanding beyond a typical, textual reading. However, facilitators sometimes struggle with the best way to provide these videos to learners. Websites like YouTube have awesome databases of videos, but allowing learners onto YouTube can be tricky; advertisements can be distracting and often inappropriate for school. EDpuzzle and other applications that allow you to add questions into videos are also great, but sometimes you just want to provide students a resource without a grade, so that they can have them for introduction, enhancement, or review.
Taking all of these thoughts into consideration, what’s the best way to create a playlist of videos for learners?
Enter Wakelet.
Wakelet is the best tool out there for curating resources, whether those resources are documents, videos, links, or anything else. You can add anything with a link into a Wakelet collection, and it’s all free! In addition, these collections can be shared with anyone, even through Google Classroom. If you want to create a playlist of videos, you can pull links from YouTube, or you can search within YouTube and add straight from the Wakelet collection page.
One of the major benefits of creating a video playlist within Wakelet is that it will eliminate all of the advertisements associated with that video. The learners won’t need to leave Wakelet to view any videos – they’ll all be embedded into the collection! It’s simple to use too.
It’s also possible to crowdsource a student collection without students having to log in to Wakelet or even have an account. If you click ‘Manage Contributors’ at the bottom of your collection and then ‘Invite Contributors’ you can share the QR code or link on Google Classroom. Students can then link to their video contributions (or any other digital resource with a link) to help create a visual representation of classwork from multiple students. It’s really exciting!
In my opinion, you can’t beat Wakelet for curating resources. From videos to Google Drive files, the possibilities are endless. Create your own account and get started today here!
Angela Westmoreland is an instructional coach, Google Certified Trainer, Nearpod Certified Trainer and Wakelet Community member from Fayetteville, North Carolina. You can find Angela on Wakelet @AngelaWestmoreland4161 and follow her on Twitter @angelamlwestmo