Education/News/November 2025/Ukrainian educators create open lesson plans based on the «Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom» course
Ukrainian educators create open lesson plans based on the «Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom» course
As of summer 2025, the regularly running «Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom» course has reached 4,303 registered participants, with 2,056 certificates issued — meaning 47.8% of learners successfully completed the program.
Creating a personal lesson plan is the final assignment of the course’s second stage (passed separately by a few hundred teachers who’ve completed the initial course), and these assignments form the basis of an open collection of teaching materials published on the Ukrainian Wikipedia education portal.
The lesson plans page showcases how Ukrainian educators integrate Wikipedia into various subjects — from language and literature to mathematics, natural sciences, history, and civic education. The materials focus on key information literacy skills, including: analyzing and verifying sources; working with factual information; developing critical thinking; designing learning activities that help students make evidence-based conclusions.
Ukrainian teachers demonstrate a wide range of ways to integrate Wikipedia into classroom activities. In one lesson, students use Wikipedia to explore the cultural and historical context of Mykola Gogol’s Taras Bulba, comparing the literary text with artworks by Ukrainian and international painters and building their own interpretations based on Wikimedia materials. In another example, students investigate the origins of Ancient Rome using Wikipedia articles about Romulus, Remus, and the early Roman kings, working in groups to analyse rulers, compare political systems, and present their findings. Both lessons show how educators use Wikipedia to support source analysis, collaborative learning, and evidence-based reasoning across different subjects.
All lesson plans are openly available and can be reused or adapted by other teachers: Lesson plans
Marysia Lebid is a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature, world literature, and head of the Polish studies club at Lyceum №38 in Poltava. She participated in the second stage of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom course and created one of the featured lesson plans:
In developing my lesson plan, I relied on my own experience as a teacher of world and Ukrainian literature at a school in Poltava. I showed how Wikimedia projects can be integrated through the example of the literary work Clay Bird by Olena Kolinko. For example, we use Wikipedia to learn about the author’s biography, Wiktionary to explore the specific genre of the work — the eco-novel, and Wikiquote to study the text and add new quotes based on the original story. Students also use Wikimedia Commons to select images that could be connected to the work. At the same time, the students work in micro-groups: the history group studies Wikipedia materials about the Trypillia culture (the title of the work is related to this ancient culture), the ecology group examines information about the problem of landfills in Ukraine and around the world, and the arts group explores pottery-making centers through Wikipedia articles, such as those about Opishnia ceramics. At the end of the lesson plan, I created a checklist for evaluating the students’ contributions during the lesson. Such types of work allow students to interact within the Wikipedia environment, use different Wikimedia projects, and develop critical thinking through source analysis.
These materials are especially valuable for newcomer teachers, who may still be exploring how to use Wikipedia in their classroom practice. Ready-to-use examples help them confidently take the first steps and apply Wikipedia as a tool for strengthening students’ information literacy.