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Coding session at school - Photo by Jérôme Coupé

Teaching in the open: Craft and Jekyll workshops on Github

As a teacher, I want to stay current and not bore my students with outdated technologies. Being a freelancer helps, but I believe teaching in the open can too. All my courses are available for free on Github, and I began translating some of them in English as an experiment.

Teaching in the open

It's been a couple of years since I have been officially appointed as a part-time teacher and I have since been spending half of my time teaching and half of my time coding and working as a freelancer. From the get go, I had decided to publish all my courses on Github for the following reasons:

  • Using familiar tools helps me reduce friction and update the courses more frequently.
  • It allows my students to see when things where edited and why.
  • Markdown files are a lot easier to edit that Word documents. Also, code blocks and syntax highlighting.
  • It is my own modest way to give back to the community I learned everything I know from.
  • Students and anybody else can submit issues and pull requests.

The last reason is also why I have decided to translate some of my workshops in English. I mostly teach in French but the lingua-franca of the web community is definitely English. By translating some of the workshops, I hope that more people will have a look at them, hopefully learn a thing or two but also submit issues or pull requests if they see something strange or just plainly inaccurate.

Craft and Jekyll

On top of my fixed curriculum, I have a series of one day workshops that I am in charge of and for which I can pretty much choose what I want to cover. Some of the topics come and go but, over the course of two years, Craft and Jekyll have been quite in demand and have earned their slots as "technologies in which 22 years old geekettes and geeks are interested in".

The teaching material for these two workshops is available on Github in French and English. I'll do my best to keep these courses up to date with the subsequent versions of these two softwares. If this experiment proves successful, I'll probably go ahead and translate other workshops covering various themes throughout 2016.

Have a look and, if you have five minutes to spare, I would be thankful for any issue or pull request about the silly things you are bound to find in there.

On demand workshops

If you or your company are interested in a workshop covering one of these topics in French or in English, hit me up. I have done a few workshops out of school this year and I am looking forward to other opportunities.