Eclectic Technology

"Today, we’re proud to launch “Mozilla Webmaker,” a new program to help people everywhere make, learn and play using the open building blocks of the web.

The goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web.

Concretely, Mozilla Webmaker will offer:

1) Tools. Authoring tools and software, designed and built with our community. From supercharging web video with Popcorn, to remixing with Hackasaurus, to making your own web pages with Thimble..."

We often speak about having our students be creators on material for the web (as opposed to movers of material that is already on the web). This new program from Mozilla will provide tools, projects and a community that will help us help ourselves and our students become creators on the web.

One of the very first "a-ha" moments I had when I was trying to teach myself HTML was that I could right-click and "view source."...at the time, I felt as though I had pulled back the curtain on the Great and Mighty Wizard of Oz. "So that's how they built it..."Mozilla's Hackasaurus taps into that same sort of discovery, that same act of peeling back the layers behind a Web page. 

NewsJack is a product of MIT's Center for Civic Education. It is built on Mozilla's Hackasaurus and allows users to remix and edit news websites, thus their tag line "All the news you'd love to see."  You have the option of choosing CNN, Fox News or the NY Times as sites to remix, or you may enter your own URL.