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, which 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.
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, the website won’t really be hacked – 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.
