Earlier this month, we invited you to teach and share using our new Teaching Kit templates on webmaker.org. The goal: make it easy for educators, mentors and techies around the world to share creative ways for teaching web skills, digital literacy and making.
Here’s five creative ways our community are using the new kits:
1) Teach web skills by making something fun
That’s what Christina Cantrill‘s great new teaching kit does. Christina and her colleagues at the National Writing Project have assembled a unit full of fun activities that explore what memes are and how they work. They then encourage students to dig deeper, tracing the origin of the meme concept to Richard Dawkins’ theories of cultural knowledge and the first-ever “lolcat” photos — dating back to the 1870s!
2) Train the trainers
Michelle Thorne made this teaching kit as a step-by-step guide for training other facilitators and mentors. She tested it out at a training event in Bangalore. You can remix and share it to train other facilitators, mentors and coaches for your next webmaking event or hack jam.
3) Introduce the basics of exploring, building and navigating the web
Doug Walters created this teaching kit for an adult education course. Borrowing from the Web Literacy Standard, it links through to several individual activities to create a larger overall unit and lesson plan.
4) Explore online privacy issues
Karen Smith, Patrick Wade and the Our Privacy Matters team have been developing a whole series of teaching activities around online privacy. Using an online documentary as starting point, their kits explore youth, identity, and online sociability. Karen is also going to be working with university students to develop a whole series of their own teaching kits this fall.
5) Send learners on a trip to Mars
This kit (still a work in progress) will introduces learners to free 3D resources they can use to build their own “Mission to Mars” experience. Created by Cizzle, one of the winners from the Mozilla Ignite program, their kit is a great example of how baseline themes in Thimble can be remixed to create something that looks and feels totally unique.
Make and share your own Teaching Kit
- Get started here. Choose a template and start remixing to add your own content.
- Have a look at examples. See what others are doing. Or if you see something you like, just hit the “remix” button to customize or adapt it.
- Stuck? Have a look at these tips and tricks. Or get in touch with OpenMatt or Laura — we’re here to help!
These new templates make it easy to share lesson plans and learning activities