Publishing Reflections on Common Core Using Mozilla Webmaker

Several weeks ago, The Northern California Writing Project hosted what we lovingly termed “Nerd Camp”.

A group of teachers who were involved in a several-year inservice project exploring the Common Core was invited to consider how web technology might support the work.

We started by writing reflections regarding our discoveries during the project. We then turned to the web to showcase our findings. Publishing the work online developed web literacy in both HTML and CSS.

To create content for our pages, we explored the topics of using Wordle to create infographics, BitStrip to create comics, Explain Everything to create screencasts on iPads, and YouTube to host video.

After developing each piece of content, we turned to The Mozzila Foundation and its “teach the web” tools to showcase our work online. The resources of the Webmaker Initiative
are amazing teaching tools. Using their web publishing tool Thimble, we explored how to write HTML code to display our content online. Thimble has many templates available to help learn HTML and they host the published pages.

Participants quickly caught on to writing computer code to display paragraphs, headings, lists, and links. Many began to dabble in CSS to add style to their pages:

• Amanda von Kleist’s project
• Andrew Farrell’s project
• Kelley Jardin’s project
• Lisa Romo’s project
• Armando Romo’s project
• Avery Brown’s project
• Rochelle Ramay’s project
• Lynn Jacob’s project
• Heather Felciano’s project
• Jan Peterson’s project

Thanks to the tremendous content created by the participants and the outstanding “teach the web” tools from Mozzilla. We had fun, reflected on our study, and developed web literacy.

If anyone is interested in learning more about the Mozilla Foundation’s tools and resources, they are holding a “Maker Party” this summer. Learn to teach the web.