Tag Archives: mentors

We Made It! Mentor Team Make Week

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Making It in Brooklyn: Webmaker Mentor Team Make Week in Brooklyn

Last week we had Mozilla Mentor Community team members from Toronto, Germany and New York City together for whirlwind week of making, plotting, talking (some talking is OK!) and of course, etherpad spawning. Here’s the overview from Day 1.

DAY 2

A fun Mozilla NYC dinner (with special guest David Ascher) at Rucola followed by raucous debates and night caps at the Nu Hotel, we had renewed vigor for Wednesday. Early in the day we revisited our Task Board and giddily moved sticky notes to track our progress–from “Make” to “Making” and some to “Made!” We also set up our projects for the day and were joined by teammates Beatrice Chen (Hive NYC and Mentor team archivist extraordinaire) and Julia Vallera (Hive NYC and Mentor team educator/superhero).

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We spent time exploring how sites and communities like Mentor Mob might make our Activity Kits and resources more visible and remixable. We honed in on MOOC and Maker Party plans and messaging. We also reviewed a mentor badge  assessment tool that Chloe Varelidi, Jess Klein and Atul Varma have been working on, and outlined the process and criteria by which mentors will earn badges and benefits on Webmaker.org. Leah and Kathryn led day two of a design charrette with Hive Toronto to gather input for Toronto’s RFP process. Through this facilitated process, they ended up with many a white board filled with thoughts and diagrams. By the end, they had articulated – in draft form – Hive Toronto’s core beliefs and had building blocks for the application process.

Guide to Wednesday’s Makes:

  • Mentor Mob Webmaker playlists
  • Julia prototyped building an Activity Kit in Thimble, Knowing Your Neighborhood
  • We continued to hone our Maker Party 2013 messaging–it’s a global party to celebrate all the things we can make thanks to the collaborative power of the web!
  • Met with Open Badges team to feedback and iterate on peer assessed badges
  • Laura shipped a color version of the #teachtheweb MOOC user experience infographic 
  • We shipped the job description for an open position in the UK to run webmaker events, build community and talent scout for Hive London (know anyone good?)
  • Shipped our thoughts and messaging about the upcoming #teachtheweb MOOC–in short: Learn how to teach digital literacies, master webmaking tools, develop your own educational resources, and take what you learned back to your communities and classrooms.http://webmaker.org/teach
  • Laura, Michelle and Matt shipped the Mentor badges brief

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#teachtheweb

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This is re-posted from Michelle Thorne’s blog. Please join us in exploring how we might use Twitter as a Webmaker Mentor marketplace. We’d like to help connect those who need certain skills or expertise with those who have it, so if you’re hosting an event and need volunteers to help teach HTML, or if you’re a programmer and want to help teach youth some new skills this summer, or if you released or came across a great resource to help others teach web literacy skills, please share and follow #teachtheweb on Twitter!

#teachtheweb

We’d like to try an experiment in a distributed “marketplace” for webmaking. The idea is simple: use the hashtag #teachtheweb to ask for and offer help.

Asking for Help

It works like this:

Say you’d like to organize a webmaking event in your city, Athens. You’ve got a venue, you’ve got some learners, but you’re missing someone who can help you teach Javascript. You can use the #teachtheweb hashtag to ask for help:

“I’m looking for someone to help teach Javascript at a webmaking event in Athens. #teachtheweb”

A community is monitoring the tag, who can amplify the request or answer it themselves:

“I know someone who can help. @NAME knows Javascript. #teachtheweb”

“I can help! When’s the event? #teachtheweb.”

The hashtag isn’t just for events, either. It can be applied to anything that helps teach the web — with a focus on asking for and offering help on specific things.

Offering Help

In this way, you can also use the tag to share things that you can help with. You could say, for example:

“I work with youth at my hackerspace and am happy to share activities they like. #teachtheweb”

“I speak Spanish and would love to help translate learning materials about webmaking. #teachtheweb”

“I’ve run a hive Pop-Up in my city and can help coach new organizers. #teachtheweb”

Betatesting

Since this is an experiment, we can’t anticipate how well the tag will work.

But the hope is that with some decent traffic and an active group of people monitoring it, the hashtag will be a simple yet powerful way to connect Webmaker Mentors and others who care about teaching the web.

We encourage you to give it a try and to let us know what you think! If you’re interested in helping monitor and field requests, please dive in and start replying. You can also check out our newly launched webmaker.org/teach for more resources and ways to connect.

If you successfully team up with someone, tell the world about it: #webmakerwin!

Brooklyn Explorers: MOUSE Corps Students as Webmaker Mentors

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This is re-posted from the MOUSE Corps blog.

This spring, a small team of MOUSE Corps students will act as Hive NYC Webmaking Mentors for middle school students participating in the PASE Brooklyn Explorers program. Omar A., Omar N., Edvinas and Wilson spent this Monday with the amazing Julia Vallera of Hive NYC becoming HTML/CSS savvy with Mozilla’s Thimble tool.  Starting in April, they will help the Brooklyn Explorers youth turn photos/videos/observations collected on their explorations into Thimble webpages and Popcorn interactive videos.

Here are some photos from their training this week:

More about Hive and the Webmaker Mentor movement here!