Discover the many uses of Hackasaurus – a tool that lets you hijack the Newsround website and write your own mischievous version of events…
Have you ever used a made-up letter as a prompt for a lesson? Maybe you have pretended to have received a missive from the Air Force asking for a new parachute design in order to teach children about air resistance?
If so, there’s a simple way to take this technique one step further using a free tool called Hackasaurus. This allows you to change the content of other people’s websites – and use this to hook children into the lesson you’re about to teach.
What is Hackasaurus?
Using Hackasaurus, you can ‘hack’ any website and change it to display the content that you provide (this works particularly well with news providers). It is extremely easy to do and will look more authentic than creating a whole website from scratch.
But don’t worry, although it will look genuine, you won’t really be hacking the website – it’s just a very real looking copy. The internet police won’t be knocking on your door.
Note: Since this lesson plan was published the web address for Hackasaurus has changed. The PDF lists the URL as hackasaurus.org, but it can now be found at hackasaurus.toolness.org.
Learning objectives
- Think about ways in which to use the news to inspire your lessons
- Understand some simple ways to design websites
- Investigate different ways in which children can present their work
Ian Addison is a Year 3-4 Team Leader at Riders Junior School in Hampshire.
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