Our goal at the beginning of this year was to support  our incredible community by finding an interesting and accessible way for mentors, and those who share a passion for education and web literacy, to connect and develop their skills.
After speaking to community members, Hive leaders, and partner organizations we decided to create our very own speaker series, inspired by the likes of Ted Talks, where we would invite industry leaders from organizations around the world to share a skill that mentors could take back to their communities to become better makers and teachers of the web.

The Talks

When we launched the Talks in winter 2014 it was really important for us to find topics that would be engaging to individual Webmaker mentors, but also to those working libraries, code clubs, and schools who wanted to grow the skills of their organization; and to find speakers who are inspiring in their work, and in their presentation styles.
When piloting the program, we invited Evan Jones from the Connected Learning Alliance to present on the basics of building an online community (watch here). Since then we also celebrated Data Privacy Day with Mozilla’s Director of Privacy, Stacy Martin, who discussed being smart about privacy and how to teach privacy in your community (watch here).

We’re quickly learning what’s working (and isn’t working) for our audience. For example, we’ve moved from an online hangout with a formal presentation to an interview style talk which allows for much more engagement during the talks. Our priorities are making the talks interesting, accessible and valuable and we’re continuing to experiment and improve those aspects moving forward.

Of course, we also learned that many individuals tune into the talks after the fact to watch the recordings. For their easy digest, we introduced the Teach The Web Podcast which is an edited, storied version of the live talks which you can listen to and subscribe to here.

Upcoming

The next Teach The Web Talk is February 26th where we will be talking to Angela Popplewell, and JP Pullos from 100cameras about how you can use photography to share the story of your event. This talk will focus on helping our community improve their photography skills to tell the best story and deliver the best pictures. You can find more details on how to attend the live talk at mzl.la/100cameras.
Feel free to share your questions for 100cameras with us on Twitter using #TeachTheWeb or  Discourse and listen to the Podcast version which will be released in the first week of March at mzl.la/TTWpodcasts.
In the next few months we are excited to continue to experiment with the format and to explore new topics with new speakers and would love to hear your ideas about topics  or people you would like to see on the talks in the future. Please email us at info@webmaker.org.