Working towards a core curriculum

Take a look a recent changes and help us continue to improve

A major goal of our recent web literacy work at Mozilla has been to improve the clarity and connection-making in our online curriculum. Community members like the librarians in our IMLS pilot project have helped us understand what works, what’s missing, and what can be improved in our participatory teaching materials.

Applauding our web literacy community for its generous help!

Over the past few years we’ve worked to create and share modules, lessons, and activities that blend offline and online activities to introduce and reinforce web literacy skills — and 21st Century Skills — like coding webpages, navigating the web, and sharing work online. A hallmark of our curriculum is its participatory nature. In our activities, learners are active and create meaning for themselves through making, performing, and playing with ideas before they approach a computer to tackle a project in Thimble, our online code editor.

Most recently, we’ve worked with consultants and community members to identify spaces in our curriculum that need something more — better definitions, clearer progressions, and more support for teachers and learners using our materials in the field.

Here are some changes you might notice right now:

• We’ve revised older activities to reflect our current editorial voice and to use our current curriculum templates.
• We’ve added optional badging language to several activities to help educators award micro-credentials in web literacy.
• We’ve added learning progressions to each lesson so you can quickly scan its content.

Here are some changes that are right around the corner:

• We’ll link lessons to a leveling scale to help you know when and how to use them with your learners.
• We’ll link lessons to a pedagogy statement to help you and your learners understand our approach and how it differs from other computer-science-y models.
• We’ll add learning progressions to each module’s landing page so you can see the overall sequencing of the curriculum and make decisions about where to begin and what to use.
• We’ll release several “explainer” videos that demo how to facilitate popular activities like Tag Tag Revolution and the Homework Excuse Machine.

Web literacy is a foundational skill for learners and citizens in our world. Knowing how the web works and can work for you is essential for full participation in the economy, politics, and possibilities of our global society. Understanding the privacy and security choices we face, championing digital inclusion, taking advantage of the web’s potential for decentralized ownership and open innovation — all of these things depend on basic web literacy and the confidence it instills in us. To know the web is to know that, yes, we can shape a better future for ourselves and our communities.

We hope the changes we’ve made help you teach the web wherever you are. Let us know if you have suggestions for us. Stay tuned for for even more improvements soon!