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- Welcome
- Lesson Plan Updates
- @toniaslimm is almost done with “Creating your WordPress Talk.”
- Copyediting Updates
- @skarjune will finish the Content Editor Overview copyedit this week.
- @bethsoderberg will audit the status of all plans in terms of copyediting once she’s caught up on life (possibly next week?).
- Feedback from Testing
- @skarjune posted a summary of initial feedback from using the plans for the WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Minneapolis Foundation Friday event. In general he found that things are complicated between the lesson plans as “train the trainer” materials and the actual volunteers at such an event. He’d do lots more planning/prep if he were to do it again. “We had success, little attrition, and great compliments from our over 100 trainees in three tracks. More WordCamps should provide comprehensive training days,” but it was “a bit nerve-wracking for me to stay on top of things.” @skarjune also observed that “one major challenge is that experienced WordCamp presenters have their own presentations that they want to stick to. I would say that mixing up materials from various sources is not a good path. We had some debates and compromises about the format in my Intro track, and we suffered because of that.”
- Things that would be useful for future planners of such events:
- a checklist of the requirements – room, software, hosts, etc. including things like power strips
- Wifi and cords and more wifi and more cords!!!
- @melindahelt thinks the community team was working on a checklist for planning hackathons and contributor days that might be helpful in making a resource for planners of these types of trainings: http://doaction.org/organisers-handbook/.
- @chanthaboune confirmed there are pages in the handbook about things you need to know as you’re prepping for an event.
- The team used Pantheon’s sandbox to get people set up, which worked really well (“In 40 minutes we had some 45 trainees on wifi install WordPress seeing the actual installation and do a Hello World! post”) though the team also had the advantage of having “Drew Gorton from Pantheon as an organizer and trainer for the Installation module.”
- @chanthaboune used the Tier 1 lessons last week in a week-long workshop for students and found that “It was, in many cases, a little too much for them to grasp all at once, so I alternated between hands-on/learning with me and gamified code basics online.
It felt like I didn’t have enough info to make it a week, but I’m glad I didn’t have more to handle. They all did a Wapuu’s Lemonade Stand site at the end.” She had them create the lemonade stand sites without a demo to follow because she needed to provide a letter grade, but outlined a few clear parameters they had to follow. She also found that “Teaching in a school on their network proved next to impossible [because] the internet was slow and all ports were inactive….so we ended up with USB installations thanks to some handy colleagues.”
- @chanthaboune, @skarjune, and @courtneyengle all have had challenges setting up local installs in a school setting for a multitude of reasons. @courtneyengle is happy to help make a checklist for getting set up in these environments and @chanthaboune has a set up process with USB drives that worked for her last week.
- Meeting Time: To Keep or Not to Keep?
- Please reply regarding your availability for team meetings on last week’s P2 post! We’ll put up a new post about a suggested new time (or a suggestion to keep the time as is) based on these responses.
- We overwhelmingly agree that we don’t want to meet on weekends.
- General Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Lesson Plan Format
- @bethsoderberg, @c3zh, and @melindahelt had some online/IRL conversations over the last few days and there seems to be general agreement that these general plugin lesson plans are ill-defined in terms of what should be contained in them. Between all of these conversations we were thinking that we need to make ONE plan that is a sample of what these could/should be and then write instructions/use that as an example for the others. The problem appears to be that it’s hard to write a general plan about the topic without talking about the existing plugins or a specific existing plugin.
- Using the Akismet lesson plan and the goal of a general spam filtering lesson plan as an example, @melindahelt facilitated a discussion about what format these plans could be in.
- @melindahelt will write a sample lesson plan using the general spam filtering lesson plan that we can tweak until we agree on a format to follow for these plans. From there, we’ll use this as a sample for plans of this type. She’s planning to follow this general plan in the draft: “if the parent theme (for spam) goes into more detail talking about website spam, why it’s bad and mention there are many ways to eliminate it, including these three plugins. (but by saying many ways, we let people know they are free to choose other ones too).”
