 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Melisa Guadalupe Huertas, coming to you from the beautiful city of Trujillo in Peru and I'm part of the education team at the Wikimedia Foundation and today I would like to share with you the start of our session on this wonderful project that we developed last year in partnership with local Wikimedia affiliates in Bolivia, in Morocco and in the Philippines called Reading Wikimedia in the Classroom. But before we start and because we would like to really, really get to know where you guys are joining from and who is in this room together with us, I would like to invite you to just join us on a Google Jamboard or using the remote chat and help us answer this one, this first question. What do you see if you open your door in the room where you are right now and you walk around? So we want to know what's outside of your door. So the way that you can participate in telling us your answers is you can go on Google Jamboard following this bit.ly link and you will see this. You will see this environment and you will see that here on Jamboard you can go to the left and put a sticky note and you can put your answer. So for example, if I open my door and I walk around for a little bit for a few minutes, what I can see is I can see a park. Wait, I forgot how to spell park in English. I can see a park. So I'm just going to move my little note, my little post-it notes and put it here. I can also see a lot of cars everywhere because I live near a big avenue. So I kind of already did yellow. So I'm going to put green and this way I can change the color. You can put the color that you like and then again just move it here. Now if you cannot access Google Jamboard, you can also let us know the answer to your question in the remote chat and my colleague Zaylesh will help bring your answers into this board. But yeah, I'll just give you guys a couple of minutes as you grab a cup of coffee or a cup of tea or any drink of your choice and you join us in this room. So I'm just going to put my timer here and I'm just going to put maybe, let's see, three minutes. All right. Now it's your turn. Cool. So I see there's somebody who opens their door, walks around and sees a cow, which is awesome. Beach and seashore, lucky you. A field, a lake, lots of trees. So glad to know that you're surrounded by nature. Field trees and vegetables, rice fields, a beach. Wow. Mi barrio, nice. I'm just going to keep moving them here. Or if you want to do like a little image of what you're actually seeing and not type it, you can also just grab this pen on the left and draw something if you're feeling artistic. That's totally valid. A pungent plant full with fruits. Oh, nice. Very, very inspired by all of your answers. Big forest with lots of trees, a train station, rice fields. Cool. That's awesome. I'm going to wait for one more minute to see if anybody else has a new answer to, and thank you so much Silesia for bringing the answers from Grimo to this jamboard as well. Oh, a friendly neighbor. That's awesome. I love friendly neighbors. I'm just going to move this one over here. I'm going to change the color of some just for variety. Cool. So I think that we've got everybody's answers now. So I'm just going to stop my counter. And thank you so much for joining in on this quick warm-up activity with us. It's really wonderful to see that even though we're not together in the same physical place, we can still connect via these digital spaces. Trees, yes. I love it that a lot of people are surrounded by trees. Cool. So coming back to our presentation, so why did I ask you about what's out there when you open your door and everything? Because a lot of what we're going to talk about in this session today has to do with opening doors. When we think about the reading Wikipedia in the classroom program, we have noticed that it really, really brings, has provided us with new opportunities to integrate Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects into the education sector. So we are excited to today open some of these doors with you and share some of the learnings that we have acquired throughout this experience. And to open, yes, and then here you can see our agenda. We will be opening three main doors. First, we will open a door to the past and we will share about why and how this project, this pilot came about. When we open the second door, we will have a round table with local coordinators from this program and we will hear about their perceptions and perspectives as they are now once they are past the program development. And finally, when we open the third door, we will start looking at the future and thinking about what's next in this program. And to open the first door and tell us about the reading Wikipedia in the classroom pilot, I'm going to pass the mic to my colleague, Nicole Saad. And Nicole, yes. Awesome. Yes, I am here. Thank you, Melissa. Hi, everyone. My name is Nicole Saad and I am the Senior Manager for Education at the Wikimedia Foundation. I lead this wonderful team that is bringing you reading Wikipedia in the classroom today. So first, I want to talk a little bit more about the origin of this pilot, how it came about, and some of the initial challenges that we face. So in 2020, we had planned to implement a teacher training program called Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom. Our original concept behind this or the motivation was that we often heard from teachers that they would not use Wikipedia in the classroom for one reason or another, but mostly because they felt that it wasn't a reliable source of information. And the other main reason is that teachers are inundated constantly with a changing educational landscape, and that's even more true now in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so they're constantly kind of thrust into new technologies and new resources that they're not always trained how to use in a way that's relevant to their local context. As we know, education systems around the world are incredibly different from one another. Teachers on the ground face different challenges. They have different access to resources and they have different access to training. So what we wanted to do was to create a program that would meet teachers where they were in their local context. And so in the midst of this planning, we had actually planned to do Reading Wikipedia in the classroom in person in schools, and then a pandemic happened. So we changed the whole format of the training program. We moved it to be a virtual training program. And in 2020, we worked with three different affiliates, one in Bolivia, one in Morocco, and one in the Philippines to create diverse linguistic and cultural educational materials in a training program. And so I think you can go to the next slide. To do this, we felt that it was extremely, extremely important to work side by side with the Wikimedia community. So in order to do that, we had an application process. We received 13 applications to partner with us on this project. And we selected to work with the Wikimedia, the Wikimedia Morocco user group and the Fill Wiki community user group in the Philippines. And through working with these affiliates, we hired local coordinators in each country that worked side by side with us throughout each phase of the project, from the needs assessment, to developing the training materials, to implementing the training, and then supporting the evaluation of the program. And so you'll be able to hear from some of these local coordinators later in this presentation, but these local coordinators were really integral to the success of this project. And they are the first ever certified reading Wikipedia in the classroom trainers. Next slide. And the result of all of this work was a nine week professional development program, particularly aimed at secondary schoolkeepers that taught them how to use Wikipedia to think critically about information and to strengthen their media and information literacy skills. So what this means is it's not just, you know, having students check Wikipedia for information, it's actually teaching them how Wikipedia works, so that when they use Wikipedia, they can think critically about the information that they find there, and that they can transfer those skills to other sources of information online and offline. And so that was the original pilot program. And I'm going to pass the floor now to my colleague Vasanti, who will tell you a little bit about the results of the pilot program. Sorry, I just realized I was on mute. But yeah. So after the program implementation, we did a post program evaluation, and we measured the outcomes and the impact of the program by doing some data collection with the teachers and also to the local coordinators and affiliates who partnered with us. And here are the list of like the resources that we produced and also the impact that we found. So we produced by the end of the program, we produced three teacher's guide containing of three modules and associated training assets. And then we also did localization in four languages from the three countries. And as a result, more than 7,000 teachers were each during the training programs. And 580 participated in the full training program and 160 teachers earned certificate. And the immediate outcome from that was that we found a jump in leadership during the month of implementation in the Philippines. And then 81% of participants, teachers, participants feel confident in applying their new knowledge and skills about Wikipedia in the next school years. And affiliates, partners also describe the experience as being enriching, engaging, revolutionary, and inspirational, while also teaching them to become resilient. Our affiliate in Bolivia has also launched a second edition of the program. And so yeah, overall teachers' perception change, which I will talk more about later. And they became more interested in contributing to Wikipedia as well. And the affiliates develop skills to work in the education sector, affiliates, partners express readiness to implement the next chapter of the program in their countries and for the jump of leadership in the Philippines. So average weekly views before the training was around 28 millions. And after our first training event, the weekly views actually jumped to 58 million. And next slide please. Next slide please. Yeah. So I'm going to talk more about the, sorry, before. Can we come back? Okay. Thank you. So I'm going to talk more about the jump in leadership in the Philippines. So if you can see on the graphic itself, over the past several years, readership trends in the Philippines have remained quite steady. But we can see a significant spike in the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. I put like some notes in there. And the opening ceremony of the reading Wikipedia in the classroom took place on September 22nd. And on average, each virtual engagement hosted by the Department of Education in the Philippines received around 5,600 views with a total of 22,400 views. And overall 600 teachers enrolled in the Philippines and which lasted until the closing ceremony on December 11th. So during that time of the implementation, we can see a significant spike in page views. And additionally, we can see this in staying after the program has finished. As the average, you can see the average page views is constantly higher than any time before the training program implementation. So going forward, we'll be exploring how this training program impacts readership when we have a large-scale partnership within the education system as we look, understand what factors contributed the most to the increase of the page views. Can we go to the next please? Thank you. So yeah, next, I'm going to talk about the outcome itself, the impact in the teachers' increased skills and changing perspectives around Wikipedia. Next slide, please. Yeah, so one of the outcomes of the training program achieved was changing teachers' perspectives on Wikipedia in education. So by the end of the program, we found that teacher perspectives toward the use of Wikipedia as a source of information became more positive. So particularly as we piloted the training program during the COVID-19 pandemic, we think that so the need for online teaching resources also increased and teachers became more open-minded to various online resources that are readily available. So if you can see the chart there before and after, so after the program implementation, we can say that 100% of teachers agree that Wikipedia is a valuable source of information and that they agree that teachers should use Wikipedia. Can we go to the next slide please? Thank you. So another impact that we see is from by building community capacity for Wikimedia Education Initiative. So we captured that how the program helped build community capacity for Wikimedia Education Initiatives. So the local coordinators and affiliates reported increased skills in carrying these activities such as working with secondary school teachers, delivering trainings and team collaboration and also developing like evaluation strategies and conducting data collection and data analysis and furthermore through the post program self-reflection form that we did for the evaluation, we learned that the affiliates identified three main impacts in their capacity. So the first impact would be their increased awareness of possible models for Wikipedia and education programs and the capacity needed for their implementation. And the second thing that we learned that there is an increase of capacity to establish partnerships and networks within the academic sector and the third one is the increased desire to promote more involvement opportunities with the education sectors and actors such as in teachers to join the local Wikimedia community and user group. Can we go to the next slide please? So yeah, also based on the post program evaluation, we also found that teachers were happy with the training program delivery and it contributed to their effort to implement virtual learning to their students as well. So teachers said that they like the way all the modules questions were shared publicly on the Facebook group and that other teachers have to answer them publicly as well on the group. So we used Facebook group as the learning management system and so that way by sharing their answers publicly on the Facebook group, the teachers Facebook group, that way teachers felt like they also learned a lot from the other teachers perspectives and answers. And one of the teachers of the teacher training participants from Morocco said that they were inspired by Wikipedia's core content policies and ended up actually teaching their students so they can verify online information and adopt critical thinking to assess the information they get online. You can read more about the program implementation outcomes and impact in the evaluation reports. We have different sessions in the evaluation report and which you can find on the Wikimedia comments, you can see the category on the screen. I think that's it for me. I'll pass the microphone back to to my colleague, Nicole. Thanks Voss and great plug for the reading Wikipedia and the classroom report. It's a really engaging read. I highly recommend anyone who's interested in this program to to go through that because it'll really tell you a lot about about how this program was implemented and what the results were. So I just want to say a little bit more about how we implemented this program and and what the teacher's guides look like. So you can see here we have three modules of the teacher's guides. They were all aligned with UNESCO's media and information literacy framework. So module one focuses on access to information. Module two focuses on evaluating information and module three which we consider a little bit like a bonus module goes into creating information. So module three is an interesting one because we get into a little bit about editing Wikipedia, but we didn't ask the teachers to do anything that would break any wiki anywhere. So we asked them to do really simple things like create an account or use the thank button. And one of the things we found as Voss mentioned is that just going through these three modules and learning how Wikipedia works and learning about some of the challenges like knowledge gaps in local languages really inspired a lot of teachers to become interested in contributing in different ways or being part of the community. So it's an interesting thing to think about if you're looking to build your Wikipedia community in your local area that really focusing on meeting people where they are. So for example with teachers meeting them in the classroom and helping them understand the pedagogy of Wikipedia in the classroom can actually interest them in becoming editors later. And that wasn't actually the goal of this initiative at all. It was only to help teachers use Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool to teach media and information literacy. Next slide. And so you can see here some of the implementation of the live sessions. So we had a few live sessions with the teachers and they were interactive and that's part of the training program. And then we think we have one more slide that shows the Facebook groups. So here you can see how we were using Facebook as a learning management system. And one of the things we learned through the pilot implementation of this program is that we did not want to continue using Facebook as a learning management system. And while originally we had decided on Facebook because it was something the teachers were already familiar with it wasn't a new technology that they would have to learn in order to participate in this program. We found that it didn't have all of the functionalities on the back end that we would like to be able to track participation and progress throughout the training program. So it was good for the pilot. We are going to move forward using a different learning management system. And so that's just one thing that we learned through the implementation of this pilot. And so with that, I think I'm passing the mic back to Melissa. Oh, I'm introducing the round table. Sorry. That's okay. Thanks, Nicole. Cool. So thank you so much, Nicole and Paz. And thank you everyone that is watching right now for your attention. And we're going to start with the next with opening the second door that I mentioned at the beginning. And for the second door, we're going to have a round table with our certified trainers, program trainers. And originally, we had invited also our partner from the Department of Education in the Philippines. Unfortunately, she could not join today. But I'm going to invite my colleagues, Sukena Abelhatt, Rahim Faraji from Wikimedia and Morocco user group, and Erlan Vega from the Wikimedia as a Bolivia user group as well, to tell us a little bit more about their experience and as developing this training. And if you guys or anybody from the audience is watching right that is watching right now, some questions come up as Rahim, Sukena or Erlan are sharing their experiences. Please don't hesitate to write them in the remote chat. We also have an ether pad open for your questions and comments. And we will have question and answer section towards the end of the presentation. So I'm going to throw the first question at the panel. And when we implemented this this program, the reading Wikipedia in the classroom in these three countries, we were very, very lucky that we were able to connect with the Department of Education in the Philippines, create a partnership with them and support teachers from the Philippines to join us via their digital platforms that the Department of Education was already using. We were able to broadcast the training to thousands of teachers in the Philippines, thanks to the use of their Facebook fan page from the Department of Education in the Philippines. Teachers were very engaged because this was considered as an official part of the professional development opportunities that teachers in the Philippines had. So we had hundreds of teachers there. The Philippines was a very, very specific model of partnership and development of this pilot. The same didn't happen for Bolivia and Morocco. In Bolivia and in Morocco we had a lot more challenges establishing an official partnership with the government or with other educational institutions because of the pandemic and working remotely as we had to last year. So I'm going to pass the mic to Sukena so that Sukena you can maybe tell us a little bit more about the strategies that you guys implemented to engage with the teachers to keep them motivated to participate in the program. Okay so thank you Melissa. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you everyone who is watching this live session now and you are more than welcome to ask questions and yeah so in Morocco the experience was a bit special as in the beginning we thought that we would handle all the training program on site and finally we found ourselves like because of the pandemic working remotely with teachers and trying to manage everything through Facebook groups and everything which was a bit challenging but then we kind of figure out how to keep teachers motivated to continue with us the training sessions and to you know keep their motivation high etc. So like me as a local coordinator and alsobrahim in other local coordinators from other countries we're going to try to keep this interaction live during the interaction or the comments with the participants or the teachers for example sometimes we just we kind of share their advancement using like this I don't know it could be like a simple message just telling them that for example we have this person and this other person who achieved the first model or the second model that's somehow a way of us to encourage them or to you know to upload their achievements also for people who kind of miss some models or some questions we somehow try to tag them using like you know the tag part in the Facebook group so we just tag them on the questions that they're missing or sometimes I just try to contact them directly using like messenger or gmail for people who are not super active through Facebook and also another way that I found personally super helpful in engaging people to keep up like the hard work that they're doing in this program is actually by talking to them like either by sending voice notes on WhatsApp or messenger or also by like accepting a call or calling them on their phone and that's something that I found super super useful because in the beginning they were like a bit shy to ask questions and stuff like that but then once I kind of tried to call them and talk to them like and live indirectly they were like more encouraged to ask questions and they were more happy and more engaged with us in the program so yeah those are like the like the the highlights of the way that I like that I managed to to use to keep the teachers motivated and also there is a this part that we can always tell them that you guys are being part of a big program and this is like a pilot program or like founded and run by Wikimedia Foundation and that this is like a big deal for Morocco to be one of the country that has been choose to be part of this program and that is also something that was like super motivated and they were like we want to represent our country and the best way we want like more activities more programs like those and yeah I think I think I was super super proud with the performance of all the teachers and the program especially that they showed a very high level of engagement they were like keeping up until the end and we had the celebration party to celebrate all the achievements so yeah I think I think it would have I think it would be like better if we had onsite training sessions but like we tried to keep it that way by keeping the live interaction with them calls voice notes like messages used in like messenger or sometimes like email too so yeah I think those are like the main things that I try to that I try to to use in order to keep teachers motivated so yeah I think that's that's that's somehow my point of view or my result from this experience that I found super super fruitful and enriching for me and I think it would be the same for other local coordinators and trainers and yeah so now I think I will pass a question to Brahim since we work together on this program in Morocco uh so um like how do you think that the this program helped to connect teacher without like with us or with the user group of Morocco how do you see that how do you see like this connection was managed yes thank you second and what can I say it was a great opportunity for for teacher to discover the behind scene of Wikipedia and the community behind behind Wikipedia and other project sister project so it was an opportunity as I said to meet the community and especially the Moroccan user group who present their support during the training as a guest and as technical support for the newcomers and we were glad about the feedback of teacher who present their desire to contribute in pre-knowledge and use the project as a new tool of teaching and they hope and we hope also that this project can reach all Moroccan schools and why not all the school of the world so we keep hoping and we keep working to expand the project and I will give the mic to my dear airline so what main in the case of Bolivia how did the pilot prepare your user group for the implementation for the second edition you are currently running thank you brahim the experience here in Bolivia was very eye-opening if we may say we we have developed some projects online and also in person with people we haven't had the chance to aim our efforts to help teachers read Wikipedia better so in a way the whole process of applying for the for the project helped us organize ourselves in the long in for longer periods of time and also it provided us with the frame that we are not using for the second implementation of the project currently we have 800 teachers who have shown interest in the project and we are still negotiating with the Ministry of Education we hope we can get them on board for this or maybe for the next year but we believe that have that has strengthened our our user group and I believe that we aim to have 200 teachers that are part of our group for for this year we also have teachers that participated in the program last year who are now being coordinators for some groups and that that says a lot about the how the program is interesting I would like to say that it's our effort only but it isn't because this is the whole WMF support it's the work of Melissa and Nicole and and you guys also because it was not just us alone it being part of a group always helped it's always nice to be a part of a joint effort by many people and I believe that the groups like this are are very important should be noted in reports and we are also supporting regional regional implementations of the of the program with native languages we have Imara, Guarani and Quechua we hope to get teachers also on board to use them and of course the approach is a little different because we want them to create content for these wikipedia who are who are now lacking and I hope we can we can push the indigenous languages on wikipedia Olga Paredes who's also part of wikimidista's the Bolivia is right now getting ready to give a talk about it and well and I'd like to open a question for for everyone a just going down to the teachers what were the main learnings the teachers took from the training what were their comments what were their new new approaches what will they do in the future it's okay now maybe you can yeah yeah I wanted to add an introversion about this like since we kind of conduct few interviews as a post program as a post program evaluation I had the chance to interview a few teachers who managed to finish the whole program and I was really amazed by by their to see but by their remarks about the program and their vision about the future of the program etc so first of all most of them has changed had changed this their opinion about wikipedia in the beginning they were like when we ask them about wikipedia do you think that it's a reliable resource of information they were more of we're not quite sure I mean we do use it but we're not sure that we can use it in school and everything but now most of them are used in wikipedia in the in their school projects they are they are they are actually organizing activities with with their students based on wikipedia they try to teach the main things about how to edit how to read wikipedia how to evaluate the articles and everything that's something that we've seen some teachers shared them shared with us some few some some few results of their students work they were like small papers with all the results on it and everything it was super super amazing to see that so they were like live results for for us also most of them they were like all of them basically were asking about the second edition so most of them were like when will you organize the second edition can we be can we like take the resources that you guys use to teach us and then use them to teach other teachers with us in the same school and we're like super happy to give them like the okay yes of course you can do that and that's something that we're currently working on so the user group of morocco is now trying to organize and manage how we will do that as a team also to expand this program in morocco especially that we've seen like this huge appetite from from teachers and we've also seen the impact of the program on teachers especially during the covid situation because most of them they said something that we didn't realize at the beginning they were saying that we didn't only like learn about wikipedia and the all the information literacy skills but we also learned about digital skills and that's something that we didn't like we we didn't plan that but it happened because because we conducted the program online and teacher were lacking this online skills and digital skills to use them in order to teach their students remotely and they managed to learn that through the program so it was like a double game for them they learned about wikipedia they learned later information literacy skills and everything so yeah i think those are like the main things that i can say about their results or the impact of the program for the moroccan teachers great i think we have some questions we have some questions from the from the comments uh brachim if you'd like to help how much territory did you cover in the program yeah so the first before the situation we had two cities uh the first place it was like kezablanca and ujda but after when covid-19 narrowed so everything changed so when we made the training online so that gave opportunity to teacher from all region of morocco that they could participate in the training so it was a great thing to make the training online so that gave opportunity to other teacher to reach us and uh yeah so we get teacher from like uh seven region from morocco so it was a great surface that we reached so that's for the region i don't know for bolivia so you can uh we actually uh covered the we tried to cover the whole country we have people from all departments and from the country we tried to cover 50 people we we showed we picked 100 teachers from 600 applicants and we were careful to see that we had 50 people from the country and 50 from the from from cities and also we looked for gender equality that 50 are teachers were women and 50 were men yes thank you so much evland uh brachim and sukeina for for sharing those perspectives and thank you erlan for kicking us off with the questions uh thank you to those who are leaving questions in the remote chat and in the on the etherpad this is making our conversation much much richer and i'm going to bring another question uh that was left in the chat and it says is the program limited to only secondary are there plans to extend it to the basic schools maybe nicole you can talk a little bit about that and then maybe pass it to erlan who are you know wikim millions of bolivia are already expanding and looking into new opportunities sure thanks melissa so the training program the materials and the structure of the program is contextualized for secondary schools so that's the main target of freedom wikipedia in the classroom as it has been designed and you know for a few reasons one secondary school covers lower secondary and upper secondary so that's kids around 11 to you know graduation age in a high school or secondary school um that's a that's a pretty wide coverage in terms of you know age ranges and it's it's the time in school when students are learning media and information literacy skills more directly right and it's also an age where students are more capable of engaging with our wikimedia projects so if you think about the reading level of most wikipedia articles i don't know if any of you have ever done a reading level analysis in your language i've done it for english um not only on wikipedia but also on simple english wikipedia and i think you might be surprised to know that even simple english wikipedia is written at about a tenth grade reading level in english um so that means if you are below a tenth grade reading level that you would struggle um reading a lot of the vocabulary words that are present in those articles so that's something that you need to think about when you're thinking about you know what age group you want to engage with um because if you're doing a program that targets younger readers um they might not be able to read the content uh on wikipedia and there are wikipedia for kids um but those are not covered in this teacher training program so we didn't cover um any of we didn't cover simple english wikipedia which wouldn't even be readable by young kids but there are like plexicon or vikidia and other languages so if you think you could adapt these materials to um to one of those wikipedia for kids that could be something very interesting but it's it's just something you need to think about in terms of the audience that you're engaging so if you're engaging teachers who teach younger kids um you would have to help them understand uh how to adapt the reading level to those age groups um but if you were to say look at um targeting university students or tertiary education that could be a much easier adaptation let's say so with that said i'm going to pass the mic to Arlong who also has some ideas about this thank you nicole we uh didn't intend to to work with with primary and and secondary students of first and second grade but by request of primary teachers they say that by sixth grade which is more or less more or less 11 years old they uh they are they are they get cell phones and since they get cell phones they are exposed to the internet and teachers believe and that's what they say they believe they they should be already ready to read critically which is one of the main points of the program so we're looking at ways to um to develop to change part of the program of of course taken into consideration what nicole said that uh we should be very careful about the material that they that could be uh understandable by them but also that that the objectives of the of digital literacy are fulfilled and this is going great we're gonna give you more news in the future as it develops thank you thank you erlan and i'm just going to bring one bring up one more question we have a few minutes left in this panel and maybe nicole you can also help answer these what will the post program strategy to the pilot countries look like will these be handled by teachers then on or education ministry and just give like a little preview because we'll go into that yeah this is basically what we're doing today during this presentation is talking about what's next so this um you know first edition was a pilot and we piloted in these three countries and so um each of them have you know thought about continuing on in different ways but it's really been up to the you know the affiliates and the local coordinators to decide how they want to continue going in each country so i know in bolivia you're already going you're like you're already going and i know in marocco you want to um you know try really try to establish that ministry partnership um and you know it's also a challenge because in marocco people really like to be in person and we're still you know having challenges with that um you know but inshallah it will happen and we'll be able to do it in person um and then in the philippines you know the there's you know there's been some um some changes in um in the staffing of the people we are working at the ministry of education um and they're also you know kind of doing different stuff so we're still kind of waiting to see how that will evolve but the next steps for reading wikipedia beyond the pilot are to bring this program to more countries and um get more people to be certified as trainers and so that's actually what we're here to talk about today is the training of trainers um and so with that i think i'll just pass the mic back to melissa thank you nicole uh yes and before we go into deeper about learning about the training of trainers um i would like to just thank you once again brahin sukeina and erlan for joining us in this panel today in wikimania virtual wikimania and uh i don't know if you guys want to close off uh with some some final words uh maybe brahin what to say uh i hope that's uh that project can can reach all schools in the world and in order to to build the generation of of knowledge you know that will make the world a better place and thank you all member of education team who supports us and with this amazing project and hope to continue together with others and yeah we are here if you need anything and keep working for this amazing project thank you all thank you for him uh sukeina i'm gonna invite you to unmute and share some final words with us yeah sure um first of all yeah i'm super excited to be here and to talk about this amazing project as it was like i i believe that it's a super successful project even though it was a pilot one but i believe that it was a real project like a successful one since we've seen the real impact on teachers all like over the three countries and i also want to say thank you uh for nicole melissa for you and for vasanti for silage like especially i've seen how how challenging it was for you guys to manage the whole project we've like especially with the covid crisis we had to change the perspective and everything i believe that you guys worked hardly on that and i believe that it wouldn't have been like this accessible if it wasn't like for your continuous support to us local coordinators and to to this this program so congratulations for all of us and thank you for you guys for being like such supportive people during this this this project and i i'm super eager to see the next steps i think i'm super eager to see the next steps of this project and i i'm quite sure that it will be successful i've already seen like the appetite for this project in other countries other week comedians are starting to ask about it so i believe that we will have a we'll have a very good uh next editions for the the countries already have the first one and first editions for the countries who are you know eager to to to to build this new project there thank you thank you so much for those kind words i mean it was it was truly a team effort and i think we all yeah shared struggles shared celebrations and we were there for each other all along uh amigo erlan your turn hola kamisaki how are you i am very happy to say that the project gave us gave me as a teacher an idea to better convey what wikipedia is because of how i've always had the idea that wikipedia belonged in education this is not the first time we we see this this this model right uh it was uh 2012 uh that a very small team of wikipedia education uh distributed some t-shirts red t-shirts with the slogan with the model saying that wikipedia belongs in education and it's been uh it's been some time until we have now introducing wikipedia in education in a way that is um uh possible for teachers to do in spite of connection problems in spite in even of uh even of computers or cell phones we can just print the article and follow follow wikipedia rules follow wikipedia uh principles and deliver digital literacy it's amazing and we hope that we can still stay together and keep working and make this program bigger and bigger thank you all thank you so much and just a virtual and physical round of applause for our wonderful panelists and friends uh and thank you so much for everyone who is uh continuing with the with with this session and and you know coming uh sharing with us this um this space sharing sharing this space with us um and now we move on to the third and final door uh opportunities for impact and becoming a certified trainer and so nicole already mentioned uh talked a little bit about these what is next and we have some questions as well about what is next in the in this program um so before we go and I share with you exactly our plans I would like to invite you to do uh just another quick um thought exercise with us and think about the education sector and the teachers and the students in your own country and I want you to imagine and think a little reflect a little bit about what doors could this program open if it were to be implemented in your country maybe there are some educational policies uh that foster media and information literacy skills or critical uh the development of critical thinking skills um that teachers in your country are engaged in I want you to think maybe a little bit about what could be the impact of teachers integrating wikipedia in their classes what does a generation of teachers that value and leverage wikipedia in the classroom look like and maybe if there are any allied organizations in your country that are working on professional development initiatives for teachers that could help implement or that could be interested in implementing this this program in your in your context and in order to help us you know make this brainstorming more visual and more social I'm going to invite you back to the Google Jamboard that we were using at the beginning I'm putting there the Bitly link and Silesh if you can help me on the remote chat to share the link again as well but if you go on the Jamboard I will bring it back and you go on the second page you will find uh this space and again we just want you to think about the the questions uh you know what does what what could be the impact of a program like this in your country are there any opportunities any educational policies professional development programs for teachers that are already in place please share them with us again if you go on the left menu you click on the speaking note you can just share your ideas over here so for example uh like we mentioned UNESCO has this media and information literacy uh framework and some initiatives around the world to to strengthen disabilities in teachers and in students and in my country also for example we have um I'm not not it's not a media and information literacy but maybe yeah oh sorry yes I I will put the I will put the questions back on the screen so you can so you can so you can reference them back but think about that think about any educational policies or or professional development programs as well or even some similar initiatives that you have seen other organizations implement around where this program could fit and I'm going to give you five minutes yes so that you can just fill the Jamboard with your ideas with your thoughts if you think of some possibilities but also maybe some challenges as well please share them with us and we can think around them together um I'm just going to mute my mic for these five minutes as you work on the Google Jamboard if you don't have access to the Google Jamboard remember you can also you leave your answers to these questions on the remote chat and Silas will help us uh bring bring them to the to the Jamboard um if you need some time to brainstorm a little bit longer take these five minutes to stand up from your seat stretch your legs go you know refill your water refill your coffee and then come back and share your ideas so I'm just going to mute myself for a little bit while you guys work on it and if there are any other also other questions please continue to leave them in the chat thank you so much for staying with us for these for this session um we are super super close to the end and sharing with you more of the next steps just a quick time check we have two and a half minutes uh and then we'll check on the ideas that were shared on the Jamboard keep them coming okay so I'll use these last minutes to just read out loud some of the questions the comments that we have been getting uh I'm just going to stop my timer so it doesn't sound too loud okay so this can improve let's see the first question the first comment this can improve first of all literacy skills of the students and then go ahead and influence their information literacy skills as well teachers in turn get an opportunity to introduce to the students a wide range of learning materials that Wikipedia provides awesome um university education students pre-service teachers yes uh pre-service teacher teacher training is so important there is also the opportunity to make teaching and learning easier by this approach great the territories with different languages that the official that the official one could be more interested because it allows them to develop projects in any language no matter how big or small for example the Basque country case nice I think in an alliance that the government has with me Microsoft due to due to Covid I am not sure how they will take an initiative like this okay interesting um I work with wikiblind.org we have members of the blind community around the world who are available to help but we have not yet connected them with wiki projects there where they are wanted eager to partner with anyone here who'd like to connect awesome and Philippines was one of the recipient of this great program it really impacted the education sector and so as local wikis but the next good thing that may happen as we adapt this is the sustainability of the program teachers and students will not only be users but they can actually engage as editors and contributors on our local wikipedia many other innovations may evolve as this goes along excellent this will give teachers digital skills to train students and making knowledge for free which will develop the students capacity in the future yes there's such great ideas and I'm just going to read this last one that showed up here France CRI Harris.org is in France a university department specialized in exploring educational methods could be an entry point for education and wikipedia it could be cool so with these wonderful ideas let's start thinking let me share with you what is next so for 2021 and beyond we set up two main goals regarding the assets that we created as part of this program we want to support partners to translate adapt and contextualize the teacher's guides to enhance their own programs if you go into the category that where that Passanti had mentioned where the report can be found you will see all of the assets that were created for the program and you can also see some additional translations that are coming from the community already available and we are supporting any affiliate any volunteer that wants to you know maybe has sees a valuable section in the teacher's guides and want to adapt it and bring it in a different format or use it for one of their ongoing education programs so we're super super eager to support anybody who wants to use these assets reuse them remix them on their own for their own purposes they're all on commons and they're all open license and our second goal is to create a network of certified trainers that can that are able to localize the program and train teachers in their own countries and this is where the next stage of the reading Wikipedia in the classroom program is which is the training of trainers programs that will take place during this year of 2021 our goal in the training of trainers program is to certify 25 trainers 25 trainers who are able to adapt and implement the reading Wikipedia in the classroom program in their own local context to help teachers integrate Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in a meaningful way in a way that responds to their context and a way that responds to their local Wikipedia community their linguistic Wikipedia community and so that teachers can really really meanfully engage with the curriculum this is this training of trainers is going to be an eight-week program and it's going to happen fully online the weekly commitment of hours in on average is going to be between five and six hours per week right now probably some of you already know we open the applications on August 2nd and they are open until the end of this month until the end of August 31st you don't have to be an educational professional you don't have to be a teacher to apply you don't have to be a seasoned week median we are inviting everyone that has interest in the program that really kills that can really see the impact of implementing a program like this into their countries to apply to the training of trainers and once people finish the successfully complete the training of trainers you will be certified and you will be included in this network of professionals who are ready to be hired by allied institutions who are ready to implement the program on their own and just make this a reality for the teachers in their own countries the training of trainers program is going to be comprised of three main modules in the first module you will approach reading Wikipedia in the classroom as a learner so you will put yourself in the position of a teacher that is going through the curriculum and you will be able to start identifying what are some of the localization needs where the curriculum can be adapted we will support you with research to make this a meaningful localization and once you are done completing the program as a learner you will start you will put yourself in the position of the facilitator of the person that teaches the program so we will work on facilitation techniques how to use the learning platform that Nicole mentioned at the beginning of the talk and how to build the training structure for the program in order to bring it down to your context and finally the last two weeks of the training of trainers will be focused on the planning section of this program so Nicole mentioned at the beginning as well that with the local coordinators we worked together on the needs assessment so we interviewed we surveyed teachers we conducted our research as well with some graduate fellows that we had in the team so all of the previous preparation work we will teach you how to do it as well we will talk about outreach and partnership strategies and but some basic budget planning for a program and then finally some monitoring and evaluation strategies so that once your program is implemented you can also conduct the the evaluation portion and come up with your own progress report and then make changes and adjustments for the next iterations so so it's something that is you know sustainable and a learning opportunity for everybody involved the methodology that we will use for the training of trainers because like i mentioned it will be a fully online training we will have a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities we will have an open edX platform as our learning environment and we will have a combination of practical assignments and localizable assets that will add to a final product every week whatever you are working on in the training of trainers will result on your project planning implementation for reading Wikipedia in the classroom in your country and finally we will have active feedback loops and we will have weekly office hours as well to support this cohort of 25 trainers to really make get the most of this experience and get all of the support that that is needed what is the application process if so far you are super super feeling super super excited about reading Wikipedia in the classroom you cannot wait to bring this program into your into your city into your country and share with your teachers the wonderful things that is Wikipedia first you should go to meta our page on meta and we will share the links as well in the in the ether path in the chat later on review all of the details that we have on meta make sure that you are ready to commit to the full program the eight weeks and we have also a friendly space policy a code of conduct that we encourage you to please review and see if you agree with it before you apply then to make a strong application prepare your prepare thinking about your motivation to apply for the training of trainers your previous experiences as a trainer and how you what is your vision to make this program sustainable in your context so it's not just a one-off program you know what what can you bring so that the program can stay in advance throughout the years once you have this kind of reflection done figure it out you can go to the application form which is also available on our page on meta and it will be open like I mentioned until the end of august until august 31st after that all of the applications will be reviewed by a panel and 25 applicants will be invited to join the first cohort of this training of trainers this is just the first cohort after the cohort is over in December we will go through an evaluation and review period and we will invite another cohort of people to join the second training of trainers program so this is not just like a one-time thing we're really really hoping to make this a consistent opportunity for anybody that wants to become a certified trainer and wants to bring reading Wikipedia in the classroom to their local classrooms so again who should be should be applying you can apply if you are interested in Wikimedia education work and you want to build capacity around education programs for your local Wikimedia community we want you to apply if you are super interested in implementing a localized version of this program in your country if you are able to commit to the six hours per week for the duration of the program which is eight weeks if you have some connections or if you have mapped some organizations institutions that work in the local education sector we really really appreciate you apply and most of all if you're ready to open new doors and make an impact on your local education sector with the power of Wikimedia so I'm going to give you just a quick overview of the application to the training of trainers what what are some of the questions that are included in the application and again you can go back to the Google Jamboard and if you go to the third page if you go to the third fourth and fifth page of that Google Jamboard you can see that there are these little cards so if something you know start if you start if I start if I a site continue talking you start thinking of ideas use this space as a as a note taking a space or you can take take downloads yourself but just really you know like don't just listen just start getting inspired and writing down your thoughts so this is what the application looks like we will also share the link to the application in the chat but everything is in our meta page and like I said there are three main things that we want you to focus on your motivation your experience and your vision for sustainability regards in regards of your motivation there are two main questions that will let us know about yeah what is motivating you to apply so the first one is very straightforward and what motivates you to apply and we want you to think to share with us a little bit about what about the potential impact of the training in your local education sector inspires you to pursue becoming a certified trainer of the program what are some of the you know like some of the conditions like we did in our previous brainstorming what are some of the the the opportunities that you see in your local education sector to make this program a reality but also think about your Wikimedia affiliate work if you are already part of a Wikimedia affiliate that is doing work in the education sector or that is having education programs could these a certain the could this certification support the strategy of your affiliate of your user group of your chapter um maybe do you have some really motivated volunteers that are eager for an opportunity to develop their leadership skills or their project planning skills um who could be a great candidate for these uh for this uh for this training of trainers programs you know uh what what are some of the what are some of those capacity building opportunities that this could bring to your organization your Wikimedia affiliate um so mostly thinking about these two elements why is it important for the local education sector for the teachers for the students in your country and what could this mean also for your Wikimedia affiliate or the organization that you are representing if you're not part of a Wikimedia affiliate because like I said everybody's welcome to to apply um and then this is one of our favorite questions and you will see a lot of uh also panels or discussions around this question why does Wikimedia belong in education we all know that Wikimedia it's important right that Wikimedia has a place in education what is your perspective about this about the value that Wikimedia brings to the education sector and the actors involved um we don't need you to write super long essays but uh make sure that your vision that uh your um yeah your your inspiration is really coming through in your answers for the second aspect uh about around experience we want to know if you have had any previous experience uh facilitating trainings for teachers but also for a general audience and if you have any links to uh articles or videos of you doing these activities please share them in the application as well and finally this is optional uh but we would really really love to see maybe uh if you have a resume online that talks about your professional uh uh life or or if you have a wikipedia if your wikipedia user page has information about some of your professional activities also share share that link with us we just want you to we just want to learn more about your professional experience and finally uh when you are thinking about sustainability um the first the questions that are connected to this aspect are you know if you're really really applying because you want to train other teachers in your locality if you're not sure yet be honest you can also tell us like oh yeah it's probably super inspiring I can see the impact I can see the potential but I am not sure if I will be able to implement it you can also tell us if you're not sure yet if you have an estimated timeline as well for the implementation of this program you can also tell us and oops I missed one oh yeah and very important any local partners do you have any local partners identified ministry of education uh allied organizations uh teacher training institutes etc um it doesn't matter if you don't have the connections to them yet because we can work on that through the training of trainers program but just it's important for us that you know who is who is a potential ally in your education sector um if you really require assistance from the wiki from wiki media foundation team to build these relationships also let us know and um and yes uh something that we will facilitate at the end of the training of trainers everybody that becomes a certified trainer will have access to a small pool funding to cover some of the costs of the program implementation so for example if you are part of an affiliate and you already have a staff doing education projects and the staff capacity is there they were looking for a new program to implement but you don't really have money to pay for the translations of the teachers guides for example or you don't have money to you want it's possible to do in person training and you would like to I don't know you know make make sure that this is a great experience and you are missing some elements um that can also be you could you could be eligible to access uh some some funding for these specific parts of the of the project implementation but we also really want you to think about uh other sources of funding that could make this program sustainable and not dependent solely on the funding of one organization and with that you reach the end of the application form and this is the first step for you to grab the key that can help you continue to open doors through this uh Reading Wikipedia in the classroom program I hope that was uh that was helpful and informational and um the timeline like I said right now the applications are open everybody is invited to to apply uh around September 20th we will have the announcement of the cohort uh so we will invite the 25 selected participants and the training of trainers itself will begin towards the end of September and it will take it will take place until around the end of November on on December 6th we will have a graduation that's a that's a referential date and after that everybody that successfully completes the training of trainers will be certified and they can start implementing the project back to their communities and having the um uh you know Wikimedia Foundation certified trainer certified program implementation so all of the uh certificates that you give to teachers can be backed by the Wikimedia Foundation and in particular the education team and with that uh with that I I know I think we made uh yeah I think we made a good good advance in answering pending questions so I'm going to invite Nicole back to the stage to see if you want to add some more information or yeah any details that I might have left out thanks Melissa um are there any pending question we don't have any questions okay great um if anyone does have you know a question I think we have time to cover one or two so please share them in the chat if you do have a question and um I think Melissa you have covered it but um we just want to say that we're really excited to begin this new journey of um certifying trainers who will be able to um actually even be hired to do this by for example school districts or organizations um and to create that opportunity for uh for um inspired Wikimedians and other individuals who want to become Wikimedians through learning how to do this training program so we're really excited to begin this training of trainers and we hope that you will apply um we've already received a good number of applications so I would encourage you to really take time and care on your um on your application because we only can admit 25 in this first cohort um and there are quite a lot of applicants so do your due diligence take your time and um and you know really spend time on answering those questions and giving us as much information as possible um a question I want to pass back to you Melissa uh are you able to edit your um your answers uh once you've submitted or once you submit is that it you don't have a chance to to change anything oh yes uh be very careful with the with the application submission once you see this message when you are doing you're completing the application once you see this message uh and you type your full name and you continue on the for the next that means your application is already submitted um it's not possible to edit an application that you have already sent but uh if you you know after you have heard this information and you think that um you want to improve the application that you are already sent please reach out to me reach out to the team and we can uh we can arrange uh you sending a new a new answer a new yeah a new submission um this is our main uh this is our main email address so you can just um yeah you can just send a message and and let me know know oh I really uh want to improve the application that I already sent this is my name can you send me my answers to work to work on them and you can resubmit your application in that sense yeah thanks for sharing that information Melissa I think uh people will want to know if they can edit their applications if they've already submitted them um so yes please do let us know if you've already submitted and you want to you know just do a little bit more work on your application we can arrange that um I don't know if I have anything else to add and we don't have any do we have a question yes there's there's one more question that's I left for it up so why this is from this is one of the frequently asked questions um why the limitation of only 25 participants can I still use the resources if I don't get selected for the training of trainers that's a great question so why only 25 well the reason we only are admitting 25 per cohort is because student-teacher ratio is very important in terms of quality education programs and quality training programs and we are currently only resourced to um to give a quality training program to 25 at a time so you know that might in the future change but for right now that's what we are able to do and we want really want to make sure that each cohort gets our full attention and gets um gets all of you know all of the um quality training that we can provide so that's why 25 and the the resources so the teacher's guides and the other resources are available they're under a Creative Commons license um so you can use them but you can only be considered a certified trainer so you will not be able to receive the certificate to become a Reading Wikipedia certified trainer unless you have gone through the training of trainers program and that's really important because when you work in the education sector um you know it's a very vulnerable sector where you're working with teachers and students they need to know that the folks who are training them are qualified to do so so that's why it's important to go through the training of trainers program and get that certification and there will be opportunities if you don't get into this first cohort there will be other cohorts and hopefully we'll be able to scale up so that we can do more than 25 in the future so we're really excited that you're interested and that there are so many people that 25 seems like a small number so that's exciting and you know just stay tuned there will there will be other opportunities you won't be left out thanks Nicole and uh yeah one more question is that is if the training of trainers is limited to a specific region and the answer is yeah no not at all anybody can apply regardless of your of your location um the training will be conducted in English that is the only the only main detail um cool so I think we have four minutes left in this in this session and I would just like to once again thank everyone for their attention for their interest thank you also to everyone that has already applied to the to be part of the training of trainers and uh we're excited to support you during the the last a few weeks of the application process and we will have another another session another information session and support session for those who are interested in applying that will happen on Friday the last Friday of August wait I will I will put this I will put it on my on my screen this is the meta page that I have been mentioning and on this meta page you can find all of the details that we just shared here you can find the application form and like I mentioned yes Friday August 27 at 13 UTC we will have one final information and support session for those who are interested in uh in applying and oh sorry so let's just sharing a couple more questions uh that I'll just briefly address before we we say goodbye um cool so do you have to reapply if you are not selected for this cohort um we haven't really determined the details yet of that uh Nicole um I'm just gonna say yes you would have to reapply because the commitment it's important that you're able to commit to the training program and there will be you know different dates different times so you could probably just copy paste over your answers but you would definitely have to you know refill out the application cool thank you Nicole and the last question for those newbies in Wikipedia and in our country we need more trainers of Wikipedia can I apply and learn in process in the process in order to help my region uh the people in my region who wish to know about Wikipedia yes definitely yes definitely apply cool I think uh those yeah oh we're almost a time and um thank you so much everyone for the for the great questions I hope the information was really helpful for you and like I said join us on Friday August 27th if you want if you need further support send us an email uh stay in touch with us via Twitter via Facebook um also stay stay tuned with the amazing work being done by Wikimedia's of Bolivia, Wikimedia's of Morocco and the Philippines community um and yes I hope you continue to have a great last day of Wikimania thank you Nicole, Fosanti, Silesh, thank you so much. Thanks everyone thank you Silesh and thank you to all our local coordinators you guys were amazing yes big props to the local coordinators thank you so much everyone take care