CEE/Newsletter/October 2018/Contents/Greece report

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Greece report: Workshops and contests[edit]

Outreach activities[edit]

By Geraki
Geraki speaking in Wikipedia Lab
Wikipedia Lab @ Thessaloniki
More than 35 people attended the Wikipedia Lab workshop, a three hour course organized by the Wikimedia Community User Group Greece in cooperation with Goethe-Institut in Thessaloniki. The scope was to introduce and deepen the contributions to Wikipedia while introducing Wikipedia's fellow projects, such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. The workshop format included on-the-spot demonstration and practice of using the Wikipedia editing environment and all related functions.
WLM/WLE/Tech contests

Wikipedia submission to International Conference: Digital School for Educators[edit]

Online videos with Greek subtitles helped the course
By Geraki and Marios Magioladitis

Konstantinos Stamboulis and Marios Magioladitis presented the paper "Digital Wikipedia School for Educators" as part of the 4th International Conference on the Promotion of Educational Innovation. The paper presented the way they organized the Wikipedia for Teachers online course, the syllabus, curriculum and their conclusions from the operation of a digital school for teachers of all grades, which lasted 8 weeks.

Wikipedia has previously been proposed as a good practice both as a project and as a cross-domain object. The digital school aimed to educate Greek teachers of all levels and familiarizing them with the Wikipedia Education Program by proposing new ideas for project plans based on Wikipedia and its fellow projects that could potentially be applied to schools of all levels or even in university-level workshops.

As a training platform, the Digital School was built in a website that was created using the popular Wordpress software, which is mainly used to create blogs but it is also used to run major websites from large organizations around the world. In order to transform it in an educational platform, the Learnpress plug-in was installed, which allows the creation of training programs that include course modules and lessons. The courses prepared included the following elements:

  • Links to existing Wikipedia's instructions, help, and policies
  • Explanatory videos created specifically for our educational program with technical guidelines for the environment and the operation of Wikipedia
  • Videos from the Wikipedia in Education series created by the Wikimedia Foundation, subtitled in Greek
  • Texts of relevant papers presented at educational conferences in Greece, on the use of Wikipedia as an educational tool at various education levels
  • Real-time online courses via Skype/YouTube platform.

The submission in the International Conference caught the attention of many educators and received positive opinions from the audience.