Kickstarting Hive Toronto Teaching Kits

The Mozilla community space in downtown Toronto is often abuzz with amazing and diverse activities – from talks by guest speakers, Maker Party events, community meet-ups, to project collaborations – and lunch! I’ve been lucky to be involved this summer on some Mozilla Hive Toronto projects with Dr. Karen Smith as part of my graduate program in the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto (the iSchool) and have found myself enjoying this active open community space and the ideas that emerge.

Hive Toronto members are encouraged to create shareable teaching resources that will engage all sorts of communities around web literacy – to promote critical thinking around navigating the web, creating for the web and participating on the web.

In early June, we held a half day event in the community space, inviting Hive Toronto members to kickstart their Teaching Kits using Mozilla’s open web platform Webmaker.

We hope this is the beginning of a trend, where Hive organizations take their unique and individual curricula and design beautiful and shareable digital ‘how-to’ kits.

After a session on good old-fashioned paper prototyping and a walk-through refresher of some basic HTML and CSS coding, we set to work designing, prototyping and coding Teaching Kit web pages.

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We mainly focused on Webmaker Thimble, the platform that allows you to easily remix existing webpages – so no need to stare at that blank editor page! As well, digital templates for Teaching Kit and associated Activities have been designed and published and are ready for remixing and customization.

The templates are beautifully clean, easy to follow and absolutely remixable so that anyone can create a custom Teaching Kit – tailoring activities that highlight your curricula, workshops or events. This is an excellent way to feature and to share your organization’s special programming with a global digital community.

Thimble Activity Template

Thimble Teaching Kit Template

Our Process: brainstorm ideas then translate to webspace

We began the event by brainstorming – thinking about a project that can be translated into a Teaching Kit and shared online with a global community. Whether your organization is a community space, museum, library or school – think of all the workshops, lesson plans, how-to tutorials that your organization has developed and how to make it easy for others to borrow, remix and apply within their communities.

Personally I find good old low fidelity paper prototyping, using lots of sticky-notes, an excellent process that helps clarify and crystallize these big ideas into doable projects.

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Using the printable Design Canvases – that directly connect to Teaching Kit & Activity templates – available through the Webmaker platform, we formed groups and began brainstorming! Groups typically used the canvas for its prompts and then organized their thoughts on large pieces of chart paper.

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These two visualizations show the Teaching Kit & Activity design process and the low fidelity (lo-fi) to high-fidelity flow.

WebmakerTemplatetoDesign

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An interesting Teaching Kit example

An excellent example of curricula ripe for an online Teaching Kit is MakerKid’s fun and educational “Toy Hacking Workshop” archived from the Making Makers Collaborative Community Project. The workshop is designed to teach kids how to think creatively; use shop tools like saws; learn to solder; learn how to incorporate simple arduino electronics into projects; and then share their new artifacts with a group. Kind of awesome! The online Thimble-based Teaching Kit for this Toy Hacking Workshop could offer (it’s not done yet!) a step-by-step process for workshop facilitators interested in trying this activity in their community. And since the kits are shareable, remixable and open – they can be customized to any organization’s needs. So folks from all over the globe (with access to the internet) can grab the kits, use them as is, or remake with their own communities in mind.

Webmaker 101

After brainstorming and thinking about certain curricula we shifted our thinking to how to translate our stories and ideas online. We did a quick Webmaker Thimble platform refresher and reviewed some basic HTML and CSS concepts and began coding. The open web platform that Mozilla promotes is designed with remixable templates that are available for you to make your own open educational resources.

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Next Steps

Hopefully the Kickstart Your Teaching Kit event got some creative juices flowing, got people thinking about their curricula and what kind of Teaching Kit they’d like to offer and publish on the Webmaker site.

If anyone is interested in a brainstorming session around particular projects for their organization, or is not sure about their own next steps – I’d be happy to set up a time to chat.

The Hive Toronto and the Mozilla community projects are initiatives that I’m excited to help out with and contribute to. I look forward to being part of the movement to build, share, and publish open educational resources – online. Being a digital media artist and studying forms of information and knowledge sharing, I look forward to sharing my own skills with Hive Toronto members.

Look for my teaching kit about creating teaching kits around the end of the summer!

Michelle can be reached at
Email: michelle.gay@mail.utoronto.ca
Twitter: @mishymishyme
Web: http://www.michellegay.com
My first teaching kit: Your Story Goes Here: an urban planning storytelling kit