Mozilla's Thimble and Webmaker Get Nods for Teaching Web Development Skills

For a long time now, Mozilla has been quietly pursuing training and educational goals surrounding making people more web literate. One of the company's tools, the Thimble collaborative code editor, which is designed to make it easy for anyone to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript, recently won an award from Common Sense Media for being one of the best educational tools online. Thimble is actually a subset of Mozilla’s Webmaker project, which is aimed at teaching all kinds of web literacy and development skills.

As Lifehacker recently observed:

"Webmaker has three major components—the Thimble interactive, collaborative code editor that demystifies HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and corrects you as you write it (and shows you the results of what you write as you write it), X-Ray Goggles, which lets you view the source of any element on a web page—then change and tweak it to see what effect it would have on a real website, and Popcorn, an HTML5 media tool that shows you how to layer videos, images, audio embeds, and other rich media on web sites."

The folks behind Webmaker also work with a global community of educators, to find open and distributed ways of teaching web literacy on a global scale.  If you're interested in picking up some skills with web development tools, look into Webmaker here. We also covered a number of good open source web development tools and training resources in this post.