Sample Workshop Assignment For Teaching Omeka

Have you been considering teaching an Omeka workshop at a conference or for a public or digital history class?  Do you conduct professional development for heritage institutions? Are you a history (or humanities) librarian that would like to offer a hands-on Omeka workshop at your library? Are you considering leading an Omeka session or workshop at an upcoming THATCamp?

In going through my files from last semester for my annual faculty portfolio, I came across the assignment I created and taught for two hands-on Omeka sessions during the Fall 2011 semester, and thought sharing this assignment might be of use to others who, like me, provide digital literacy instruction to students and faculty, or to heritage professionals.

I first used this assignment at the California Council for the Promotion of History’s 2011 conference, as part of a 4-hour session I was asked to teach, titled “Social Media and Mashups: New Technology for Historians”, to a group that mostly consisted of heritage professionals from throughout the state. I next taught it to a group of undergraduate and graduate history students in a Digital History Tools class, when my campus colleague Dr. Ray Rast, Assistant Professor of History, asked me to guest lecture for his Introduction to Public History seminar. Both times, I was only able to devote one hour to this assignment, since I had to cover multiple tools. But, one hour of hands-on instruction seemed to leave the students with enough understanding and experience to continue exploring Omeka on their own — either on behalf of their institution, or for personal research projects. Ideally, I would have liked to have spent two hours on the assignment, with students getting time to show their own progress.

Feel free to borrow and build upon this assignment.

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