This year I am really noticing how I respond differently to things when they are beautifully designed. Whether it is fresh paint and furniture to revitalize an old space or thoughtful planning and use of a favorite tool, when it looks good, I feel better while I use it. This is why I am excited about Wakelet's newest design addition, the Mood Board.
If you haven't used it, Wakelet is a curation tool. Pull together images, video, text, tweets and more to create collections or digital bulletin boards of your best ideas. Until last week, Wakelet offered three ways to view your collections - Media View (a list view where each entry falls below the previous), Compact View (a similar view with small tiles and descriptions in a list) or Grid View (exactly what it sounds like, a grid of additions to the board). As of last week, there is a fourth option called the Mood Board.
The image above is a Mood Board view of a collection of tweets I curated following a terrific summer conference for chemistry teachers. These are all snapshots of ideas that I don't want to forgot, so this collection is a bit of an inspiration board. I don't know about you, but my inspiration often doesn't come in list or grid form, so the Mood Board is a perfect way to view these ideas. I love how it resembles an actual bulletin board! It looks like it was created to resemble the process in my mind when an idea forms from inspiration and then plays out through many iterations.
It's very easy to drag the curated items into different positions to get an arrangement that is pleasing to the eye. Hover on an item and then drag it to a new spot. Everything around it resizes a bit to make room for the new addition. In just a few minutes I had saved snapshots of the ideas I liked the most, so when I return my eyes can wander over the whole board, remembering all the possibilities while searching for a spark.
One of my favorite uses of Wakelet was as a review tool for my semester exam last year with my AP Chemistry students. The collaborative nature of Wakelet makes this possible - each student is assigned a topic for review. They had to include some text, a video, and image, and a link for their assigned topic. Each student created a collection and then added it to the semester review collection. I love the way this one looks as a Mood Board. It would be very easy for students to scan the topics and find the ones that they need to review. Plus, it's so easy to reorder them quickly into the order that they were learned in the semester.
If you're new to Wakelet, you may want to check out the Educator's Guide that is loaded with possibilities for using this tool in a school or classroom. If you're already a Wakelet user, try out the new Mood Board. You're sure to find that the beautiful design will improve your mood.