Back to school with Wakelet: Five practical ways to achieve more this year

The start of a new school year is full of good intentions.

Resources will be organized properly this time. Staff communication will be clearer. Students will keep better records of their work. That shared planning document will remain usable beyond the first fortnight. Everyone will finally stop asking where the link was posted.

Then the year begins.

New students arrive, timetables change, inboxes fill up and the useful website you found in August disappears somewhere between an email draft and fifteen open browser tabs. Before long, people are rebuilding things they have already created, sharing the same documents through several different channels and spending far too much time looking for information that technically already exists.

Wakelet was built to help with exactly this kind of problem. It gives people a simple way to bring links, files, videos, images, text and ideas together in one visual space, then share that space with whoever needs it.

For some people, that means keeping their own teaching resources organized. For others, it means creating a shared home for an entire department, class or institution.

If you already use Wakelet, the beginning of the school year is a good moment to look beyond the way you have always used it. A Starter user might realize that a few personal collections are only the beginning. A Pro user might discover that Wakelet becomes considerably more useful when students or colleagues can contribute. An organization already using Wakelet across teams may find that there are still everyday problems it could be solving more consistently.

So, here are five practical ways to make Wakelet work harder this school year:

1. Organize and share the resources people actually need

Every educator has a system for saving resources. The question is whether anybody else can understand it.

A browser bookmark folder may work perfectly until you need to share it with a colleague. A learning platform may hold the official course materials but feel too rigid for the articles, videos, examples and ideas gathered along the way. A shared drive may contain everything, although finding the right thing often depends on already knowing its filename and where somebody decided to put it.

Wakelet gives those resources a front door.

You can create one collection for a lesson, topic, unit, course or professional development session, then add the materials in the order people will need them. That might include your lesson plan, a short introduction, a PDF worksheet, a video, three websites, an example of strong work and a final extension activity.

The difference is not simply that everything has been saved together. The collection can provide structure and context. You can explain why a resource matters, place instructions beside it and arrange materials into clear sections. Instead of sending students six links and hoping they understand the relationship between them, you can give them a guided path through the lesson.

This is particularly useful at the beginning of the year, when students are still learning routines and staff are trying to establish some consistency. A well-built collection can answer many of the predictable questions before they need to be asked:

• What are we doing today?
• Where is the reading?
• Which video should I watch first?
• What does a good response look like?
• What can I do if I finish early?

The same approach works for staff. A subject leader could create a collection containing the curriculum overview, key policies, useful websites, exemplar materials and shared planning documents for the year ahead. A university department could bring course guidance, library resources, academic support and recommended reading into a single space. A school leader could create an induction collection for new members of staff and update it without repeatedly rebuilding the entire pack.

The important thing is to design the collection around the person opening it. A resource hub should not feel like a cupboard that has been emptied onto the floor. Give it a clear purpose, remove anything that no longer earns its place and add enough explanation for somebody to use it without needing you beside them.

That small amount of curation can save a surprising amount of time later.

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2. Build newsletters people actually read

School newsletters often contain useful information. The problem is that useful information does not automatically become readable information.

A long email can be difficult to scan. A PDF attachment may look polished but become awkward on a phone. Important dates sit beside celebrations, policy reminders and links to other documents, with each item competing for attention.

A Wakelet newsletter allows you to combine those different forms of communication without forcing them into one dense block of text. You can include a welcome message, photographs, a video from the headteacher, a calendar, downloadable documents, useful links and individual updates from across the school or institution.

The result feels more like an important publication than an administrative notice.

For families, that might mean a weekly collection containing upcoming dates, classroom highlights, attendance information, community news and links to support. Staff could use the same format for an internal bulletin with operational updates, professional learning, reminders and examples of good work from around the organization.

The advantage is not just visual. Information can be separated into recognisable sections, allowing readers to find what matters to them without working through every paragraph. The collection can also be updated after it has been shared, which is useful when dates change or somebody spots the inevitable typo five minutes after publication.

Recent Department for Education guidance on communicating with families recommends language that is human, practical and supportive. It also advises schools to place important information in the body of an email or newsletter rather than hiding it inside an attachment. That principle is worth applying well beyond attendance communication.

People are more likely to act on information when they can understand it quickly.

A strong newsletter does not need elaborate design or pages of copy. It needs a clear hierarchy. Put urgent information near the top. Use headings that say what each section contains. Keep individual updates brief and link to further detail when it is genuinely required.

It also helps to remember that a newsletter does not always need to come from leadership. A department could publish its own monthly update. Students might contribute a regular section. A university course team could create a living weekly briefing rather than sending a trail of separate emails.

The format works because it can hold the serious and the human in the same place. A policy update can sit beside a student achievement, a reminder beside a photograph, a deadline beside something worth celebrating.

That balance is often what makes school communication feel like communication rather than distribution.

Creating newsletters on Wakelet is supposed to be easy. Taking the least amount of time for the most amount of impact. By using a basic template to get started, you're already a step ahead of the game - saving time by not building from scratch, and posting updates as they come in.

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3. Give staff collaboration somewhere to happen

Most organizations do not have a shortage of collaboration tools - sometimes they have multiple doing the same thing. They do however, have a shortage of shared spaces that people consistently use to share content.

The first planning meeting often produces a document. Someone then creates a folder, another person starts an email thread and somebody else shares a useful article through a messaging app. None of these actions is wrong, but the work quickly becomes fragmented. The conversation happens in one place, the resources live in another and the final plan is stored somewhere else entirely.

Wakelet can act as the shared layer connecting those pieces.

A team can create a collaborative collection for a project, curriculum area, working group or professional learning programme. Members can add links, files, notes, examples and ideas as the work develops. Sections can be used to organize contributions by topic, phase, subject or stage of the project.

That makes the collection useful both during the work and afterwards.

Imagine a department redesigning a unit of study. One section could hold the current materials, another could contain research and inspiration, a third could collect possible activities and a final section could show the agreed plan. Staff can see how the thinking has developed rather than receiving only the final document.

A professional development collection could work in a similar way. Instead of attending a session, downloading the slides and forgetting about them, staff could contribute examples of how they applied the idea, add further reading and discuss what worked in practice.

The OECD’s recent work on teacher professional learning argues that meaningful collaboration is central to building and exchanging knowledge within schools. It also connects strong professional learning with teacher motivation and retention. Collaboration matters because expertise is rarely held by one person. The challenge is creating conditions in which that expertise can move.

A shared collection will not make a team collaborative by itself, but it can reduce the friction around contributing, finding and revisiting the work.

The best shared workspaces also have a clear owner. Somebody should be responsible for keeping the structure usable, removing duplication and making sure the collection still reflects the project. Collaboration should not mean that everyone throws material into the same place until nobody can find anything.

Start with a specific purpose. Give contributors a simple structure. Agree on what belongs there. Then allow the collection to become a record of the team’s thinking, not merely another storage location.

• For Starter users, this may be the point where Wakelet begins to feel less like a personal bookmarking tool and more like a place where work happens.
• For Pro users, it is an opportunity to bring a wider team into a system that already works for you.
• For larger organizations, the question is whether valuable practice is still being trapped inside individual departments when it could be visible across the institution.

When you're ready - create a shared space where staff can contribute resources, develop ideas and build something useful together. It's easy!

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4. Help students build portfolios with a purpose

The phrase “student portfolio” can make the idea sound more formal than it needs to be.

A portfolio does not have to begin as a polished showcase of perfect work. In fact, students often gain more from it when it includes the work that changed, the feedback that mattered and the attempts that did not quite succeed.

At its simplest, a portfolio is a place where a student can collect evidence of learning over time.

That might include written assignments, project photographs, presentations, videos, artwork, research, certificates and personal reflections. A student can organize those items by subject, skill, semester or project, then explain what they learned and why particular pieces matter.

The value becomes clearer as the years progress.

Without a portfolio, learning can feel like a sequence of disconnected tasks. Complete the assignment. Receive the mark. Start the next one. By the end of the year, students may have produced a great deal without having a clear view of how they have developed.

A portfolio allows them to look across that work.

The Education Endowment Foundation identifies metacognition and self-regulation as a high-impact, low-cost approach to improving learning. Its guidance encourages teachers to help students plan, monitor and evaluate their learning more explicitly. A portfolio can provide a practical home for that process.

Students could add a short reflection beside selected pieces:

• What was difficult here?
• Which feedback changed the work?
• What am I now able to do that I could not do before?
• What would I approach differently next time?

These do not need to become miniature essays. A few honest sentences, an audio reflection or a brief video can reveal far more than a generic evaluation written because the teacher requested one.

Portfolios also give students evidence when they are asked to describe themselves. It is easier to talk about creativity, teamwork or problem-solving when there is a real project to point towards. Over time, the portfolio can support applications, interviews, transitions and conversations with families, but its first purpose should be to help the student see their own learning more clearly.

Teachers can support this by building portfolio habits into the year rather than introducing the idea at the end. Ask students to add something after a major project. Give them time to revisit an older piece. Occasionally invite them to choose the item that best represents progress rather than the one with the highest mark.

Kurt Prescott writing for Edutopia described portfolios as a way for students to capture learning across time, including mistakes, and build stronger metacognitive thinking. That is a more interesting ambition than creating a digital trophy cabinet.

A portfolio should show that learning happened. A way to help students collect their work, reflect on their progress and build a portfolio they can be proud of.

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5. Create student activities that feel worth doing

Digital activities often fail for the same reason worksheets fail: the format changes, but the thinking does not.

Putting ten links on a page is not automatically engaging. Neither is adding a colourful background or asking students to post a response online. The activity becomes valuable when the structure helps students investigate, decide, create, explain or contribute.

Wakelet can be used to build that structure.

A teacher might create a collection containing a short introduction, a source to examine, a video, a question and a final task. Students move through the material in sequence and add their response at the appropriate point. The collection becomes both the activity and the place where the resulting work can be seen.

For a research task, students could contribute sources and explain why they consider them credible. In a literature lesson, groups might add evidence around different themes or characters. A science class could document stages of an experiment using photographs, notes and video. Language students could collect examples of vocabulary in context and record themselves using it. A university seminar could use a shared collection to prepare reading responses before the session begins.

The important shift is that students are not only receiving content. They are helping to build something.

That creates possibilities for comparison, discussion and peer learning. Students can see how others approached the same question, respond to different interpretations and contribute examples that the teacher may not have found alone.

There is also value in giving students choices about how they respond. One student might write. Another might record an explanation, create an image, contribute a presentation or share a piece of research. The learning goal should remain clear, but the route towards it does not always have to be identical.

This is where a simple collection can become a genuinely flexible classroom space.

It can also support differentiation without making the activity feel visibly divided. Additional guidance, examples and extension material can sit within the same collection. Students can access the support they need without being sent to an entirely different task.

The test is whether the technology helps the activity make more sense. Does it bring the materials together? Does it make the sequence clearer? Does it allow students to contribute something meaningful? Does it help the teacher see the learning?

When the answer is yes, Wakelet is doing more than presenting content. It is helping shape the experience around it - guiding students through content, questions and creative tasks in one interactive collection.

The Activities feature on Wakelet allows you to achieve all of the above in a safe, secure, and focused environment. You turn a collection into an activity, assign it to students, and monitor their progress, all under the same interface. As part of our Education Group and Education Enterprise plans, this feature is a crucial one if you're looking to bring some visual, structured assignments into your classroom this year.

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Start with one problem

There is no need to rebuild your entire school year inside Wakelet before September - instead just choose one recurring problem that Wakelet can help solve.

Perhaps students regularly lose the resources for a lesson. Perhaps staff planning is scattered across too many places. Perhaps your family newsletter is useful but difficult to read. Perhaps students complete strong work and never see it again.

Build one collection that solves that problem properly, and go from there.

Make it clear. Give it a useful title. Organize it for the person opening it. Share it with a real audience and pay attention to how they use it.

Many people begin using Wakelet as a place to save things for themselves. That is a perfectly good starting point, but its real potential becomes visible when those collections begin to connect people: a teacher with a class, a student with their own progress, a leader with families or a team with the knowledge it is building together.

The beginning of the school year offers a rare moment to establish better habits before the old ones return. The resources are going to be created. The updates are going to be sent. The staff are going to collaborate. The students are going to produce work.

The question is whether any of it will still be easy to find, understand and use when the year becomes busy.

Wakelet can help make sure it is - so go ahead and discover which plan will work best for you this new school year!

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