The Microsoft Education team is always listening intently to educator feedback, whether in schools, at conferences, or online. Recently, we’ve been hearing rumblings in the education world about an amazing app called Wakelet, which allows people to quickly and easily save, organize and share content from across the web.
Last week, we saw a tweet from MIEExpert Becky Keene, an educator we know well. Her tweet said how awesome it would be if a Wakelet collections could be embedded directly into a OneNote page – see the original tweet below, and read the ensuing thread here.
Well the OneNote team thought this sounded like a great idea and sprang into action! Wakelet seemed like the perfect fit for the OneNote binder metaphor, and the ability to easily embed Wakelet on pages, organize them, or distribute to others in OneNote Class Notebook, seemed like a great match. It seemed like the right time to jump on to the #WakeletWave :water_wave:
The OneNote and Wakelet teams connected via Twitter DM, exchanged emails, and made introductions across our engineering teams. The Wakelet team added Oembed API support within a day, and then OneNote engineers got the Wakelet Oembed working within another day. After some testing and a little coordination, the integration is now live!
You can now paste any Public Wakelet URL on to a OneNote page and it will render the entire Wakelet as a live embed on the OneNote page.
NOTE: Due to a very recent Chrome browser issue, copying and pasting the URL directly from the address bar into OneNote Desktop will not automatically render the Buncee. All other OneNote versions work fine. Temporary work-around: after copying the Wakelet web address from your browser, use the right-click option Paste > Keep Text Only option in OneNote Desktop . Pasting the URL from Edge, IE, Notepad, or other any other location works.
You can now create pages, section, and even entire notebooks chock-full of Wakelets! It’s a true “Better Together” :water_wave::purple_heart: scenario!
To see some examples or how easy this is to do, see the example video of a Wakelet pages in OneNote. This integration works in OneNote Windows 10, Online, Mac, iPad, Android, and 2016
So a big thanks to Becky Keene, and all of the other educators out there who are always sending us great ideas and feedback. We promise to keep listening :ear: (and acting on it!)
Mike Tholfsen
Microsoft Education Product Manager
@mtholfsen