Webmaker/Teaching Kits
Kits that Teach the Web
The Web Literacy Map is a flexible specification of the skills and competencies that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web -- and the main way we guide learners and teachers through these skills is with a series of remixable Teaching Kits housed on Webmaker.org's Thimble web-editing tool.
Teaching kits are also highly modular. Users can change the ordering of activities, swap out one activity for another, add or delete activities, and otherwise rearrange the modules to develop courses or lessons that are suitable for their own target audiences. Teaching kits are not only about Webmaker tools -- they can be built to teach any tool or method that aligns with the culture, citzenship and mechanics of the web. Our aim in ensuring kits are modular, open source and easily remixable is to allow users of all backgrounds to engage with kits and make them work for their own contexts.
We also aim to ensure kits are discoverable across the web. By building on the MakeAPI, users can "discover" teaching kits on webmaker.org and then embed them on nearly any other website. Ideally, a user's contributions to a kit will show up in their Webmaker user profile and be acknowledged by an open badge. We are also working on a process to ensure kits can be read and modified across hundreds of local languages through community contributions to the continuous localization tool Transifex.
The process of teaching kit creation, adaptation (ie, "remixing") and use is an essential contribution pathway for the Webmaker community and its partners.
Definitions
Kits, Activities and Resources
Here is a quick glossary of some of the ways our community describes the working parts of a kit. Due to the ever-evolving nature of this project, the terms each individual uses are myriad and based on a variety of contexts -- but a good rule of thumb is to remember that each of these terms can be seen as a type of kit, activity or resource. Feel free to browse the full run-down on our /Terminology page.
Kit
A kit is a web-based collection of resources and activities that guide a user through the teaching process for a web literacy competency (or competencies). Kits are usually housed at Webmaker.org.
Our community often adds modifiers for clarity:
- Teaching Kit: Explained as a guided experience to teach a web literacy competency or competencies
- Event Kit
- User Testing Kit
- Co-design Kit
- etc.
Activity
An activity is a something you do with other people together. Activities are linked together within Kits. Many of these are documented and tagged on Webmaker. Want to try making your own? Here is a template to get started.
Here are some example activities:
- A thematic spectrogram (like this spectrogram for an interactive video activity]
- A sprint
- A jam (like this Remix Jam for cultural heritage professionals)
- An event
- etc.
Resource
A resource is something that supports teaching or learning in an autonomous context. Resources may be one-off webpages, or they may be more complex, such as a tutorial. Resources are added to support the activities within a Kit.
Resources might be:
- Tutorials, templates, Starter Makes or user-created makes
- Discussion Guides, reading materials, cookbooks (ie a Hive Learning Network Cookbook)
- Images, links or videos
Teaching Kit Roadmap
Our goals for Teaching Kits in 2014 are shared across community, mentors, partners and the Mozilla Foundation's Teach the Web team.
Together, we will aim to fill the Web Literacy Map with outstanding teaching kits, open educational resources and activities that are creative and fun for learners to use. Mozilla Webmaker already has a wonderful community of mentors who are co-designers of these materials, so this year will be all about highlighting community involvement while also building a set of exemplary kits in-house that can be easily used, remixed and shared across the globe.
Sample activities
- Community contribution campaigns. Co-design and curriculum building sessions in tandem with our Training activities that help us create exemplary kits focused on one Web Literacy skill / competency at a time, starting with "Remix". Working in the open with our lead users.
- Engaging a set of contracted professionals. Include domain experts who can build out exemplary pieces of content relevant to specific Web Lit skills. Work in tickets and deliver public-facing outcomes.
- Curation systems. Peer review and QA. Systems for reviewing and up-levelling the best work from the community.
- Robust preparation for global participation. Ensure kits are ready to share, remix and build around the world. Redesign for v2.0 of kit templates. Prepare for Transifex translation.
- Internal resourcing. Build bespoke tools, content, and apps that team members from both Product and Community teams build. (e.g., building a specific app, video, or widget to help support a given teaching kit or activity.)
Active Teaching Kit bugs
No results.
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Q1
Goals
Deliverables
To achieve the above, by the end of March 2014 we aim to:
- Test-run best practices by building an exemplary kit on the Web Literacy "Remix" pathway (see Bugzilla Bug for details). We'll start this process by facilitating a Content and Co-design Sprint at the Webmaker workweek to create intial prototypes for the kit and gather the existing best-of-breed resources for "Remix" from across the web.
- Contract a set of respected community leaders to help scope the future of our kits, write design briefs and determine best practices.
- Prototype new tools to make existing kits easier to read, translate and remix, including easier back-end code and conversion to Node for Transifex translation (see Bugzilla Bug for details).
- Redesign version 2.0 of our Teaching Kit templates for better modularity (see Bugzilla Bug for details).
Important Dates
Planning Documents
Q2
Goals
Deliverables
To achieve the above, by the end of _____ 2014 we aim to:
Important Dates
Planning Documents
Q3
Goals
Deliverables
To achieve the above, by the end of _____ 2014 we aim to:
Important Dates
Planning Documents
Q4
Goals
Deliverables
To achieve the above, by the end of _____ 2014 we aim to: