Education/News/July 2021/Announcing the Training of Trainers program for Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom!
Announcing the Training of Trainers program for "Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom"
Author: Melissa Guadalupe Huertas
Summary: Looking for a way to engage secondary school teachers with Wikipedia? Join the Training of Trainers opportunity of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program! Applications are open until August 31, 2021!
Last year, the Education team at the Wikimedia Foundation launched a pilot teacher training program that helped teachers use Wikipedia in their classrooms. Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom provided a professional development opportunity to over 500 teachers in Bolivia, Morocco, and the Philippines with localized curriculum and resources aligned with UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy framework. Throughout this 9-week program, teachers developed vital media and information literacy skills for the 21st century, including understanding how information is produced, how to access and evaluate content online, and identifying biases and knowledge gaps. All through the power of Wikipedia! You can read more details about the pilot program and its impact in our final report [1].
Now, we are opening up the opportunity to more Wikimedians, mission-aligned organizations, and individuals to participate in a Training of Trainers (ToT). By the end of the ToT, participants will be certified to lead training for Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom. They will be able to adapt & implement the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in their local contexts to help teachers use Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. Participants who successfully complete the ToT will also have access to a pool of funding that can support their local activities. You can learn more about the ToT timeline and curriculum on Meta.
We invite you to learn more about this opportunity! Review our page on Meta, join our Wikimania session on August 17th at 14:30 UTC, or join our information and support session on August 27th at 13:00 UTC (links to be announced). If you have any questions about the ToT as you work through your application please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team at education@wikimedia.org.
We look forward to continue growing this program with you!
-- the Education Team
[1] The program report shows us how teachers’ attitudes towards Wikipedia changed as they moved through the curriculum, responded to practical assignments and reflection questions, and participated in synchronous sessions led by local coordinators of the program. For example, one of the participating teachers from Bolivia said that at first he “thought that Wikipedia was a platform like Google, but now I value all the volunteer work done by the community behind it”. The program model also supported members of the local Wikimedia affiliates to improve their capacity to organize and lead education initiatives. Currently, the Wikimedians of Bolivia user group is launching the second edition of the program! The resources created for the program are available on Wikimedia Commons in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Tagalog, and they are free for anybody to use, adapt and share.
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