Preparation

Do the activity on your own to become familiar with it. Make sure your technology works as expected across a few test machines.

You may also wish to set up an account on teach.mozilla.org that you can share with your learners. This will save time later when they are ready to publish their remixes.

Review this definition of the word "Remix", so that you can help your learners (and colleagues!) understand what it means to remix a make.

Post the URL, or Web address, of today's make somewhere highly visible in your room. You may want to post it as a shortened link using a service like bit.ly.

Introduction

Have a brief conversation with students and ask them what makes for positive or awesome school classroom.

• What's there?
• What's not there?
• How does it look and sound?
• How do people feel in that classroom?
• how does it stay so positive or awesome?

Explain that today we're going to look at classrooms from around the world and think about the ways in which our classrooms are the same anf the ways in which they're different. We're going to be able to learn so much about others - and to reflect on our own classroom - because of power of the Internet and Web to share parts of our communities with others.

Brainstorm

Ask learners to make a list or map what they see in their mind inside their own awesome classrooms. Other students and the teacher can, of course, help students who struggle to begin or who struggle with writing.

Towards the end of the 10 minutes, ask students to underline, circle, orotherwise mark what’s most important to them on their lists or maps.

Group posters

Use a count-off or other randowm way of sorting learnrers into groups of four. Ask students to gather with theiir groups.

Invite learners to share their ideas about their awesome classrooms. Shy learners or those who might struggle reading can ask another student or teacher to read for them or just explain their thinking without reading from their papers.

As learners are sharing, give each group a large piece of poster paper and several markers.

Once groups finish sharing, ask students to work with their partners to draw a huge map of an awesome classroom that represents ideas from everyone in the group.

Set aside 15 minutes or so for the map-making.

After 15 minutes, gather the groups together and ask any volunteers to share their map and explain the ideas on it.

Then explain that our next step is to use the Web to look for pictures of classrooms from around the world and to compare those classrooms to our own ideas of what classrooms are and could be.

Introduction to HTML

Ask participants to raise their hands if they know what HTML is. On your projector, go to any website and right-click to “View Source” to show the HTML code for that page. If you have a participant with HTML experience, ask them to see if they can point out a “Tag” in the code. Make sure to introduce these concepts before starting the activity:

• HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the standard language for web pages.
• HTML tags - which show up between pointy brackets < > - tell your web browser how to translate the code into the website that Internet users will see. For instance, HTML tags can tell your browser when to turn text into a link, or how big to make the words appear on the page.
• An open tag, like p for paragraph tells the webpage where an element or part of the page begins, while a closed tag, like /p, tells the webpage where that part of the page stops.

Thimble Tour video

Explain that Thimble is a tool that will help learners edit HTML to remix webpages for themselves.

Project the Thimble tour video so all students can see, or have them watch on their computers. The Thimble tour video is available on thimble.webmaker.org.

Remix the make

Post the link to today's activity and ask students to go to that website.

Invite them to hit the 'Remix' button.

After students hit 'Remix,' they will go into the Thimble interface. They will see HTML code on the left and a live-view of the webpage made from that code on the right. They can click on the 'Tutorial' pane above the live-view on the right to find step-by-step instructions for remixing the webpage.

You can also do a 'think-aloud' and remix the page yourself on the computer connected to your projector. Students who might like more support than the tutorial offers - or students who learn best by listening instead of reading - might appreciate that level of support from you.

Share

Publish your remix. Invite your students to hit the 'Publish'button in the upper right-hand corner of their remix when they finish. Thimble will give them a URL, or Web address, to visit andf share with friends.

Take it a step further. Invite learners to check out the style.css file in the left sidebar and to see what happens when they change values there.

Reflection

Give students about 5 minutes to visit one another's machines or to swap Web addresses to see what other learners came up with in their remixes.

Ask volunteers to share some of their newly remixed classroom comparisons with the class.

Facilitate a discussion around questions like

• What did you learn from your remix and your classmates' remixes?
• How did the Web help you learn about others in this activity?
• What was it like to start with someone else's page to remix? How was it different from beginning a page on your own?
• What was it like to hit 'publish' and share your story online?