A Call for Volunteers

The Atwater Library Digital Literacy Project is supported by volunteer mentors for our youth media programs. If you are interested in joining us, please contact us.

We need help from technology and media people, and we can always use help on the fund-raising, administration, and other projects.

On the media/technology side, we're looking for:

• bloggers who know their way around blogging software
• video-makers and vloggers
• podcasters and audio-producers
• digital photographers
• web designers, CSS gurus, animators

On the admin side, we could use help with:

• marketing
• child care
• fund-raising
• paperwork and coordination

If you can think of other ideas of where you can help, let us know. Here is some more information.

Put your talents to good use in a progressive project that will reward you with teaching experience and curriculum development skills. The program is looking for volunteer mentors to help teach kids and teenagers skills in various creative new media. We’ll show them how things work and help them produce a final product: a hit song, a short film, an animation produced with Flash or made with magnets – if you know it, we can help you teach it. Workshops will begin mid-February and run until April 2007. Send us your CV and tell us a bit about what you'd like to teach. Our email address is volunteer@atwaterlibrary.ca.

Project description:

We want to assemble a squad of the city’s best new media experts – filmmakers, web designers, audio engineers, Flash designers, bloggers, digital photographers, video game producers, etc. – who are at the ready to help teach and assist with teaching Montreal kids who might not otherwise get the chance to learn new creative technologies. DLP volunteer mentors will help create workshops and lessons that will give kids hands-on knowledge with end results they can show their family and friends. Your contributions and lesson plans will become a resource for future use.

Volunteer commitment

We’ll need lots of your enthusiasm, lots of your knowledge, and a bit of your time. As a volunteer mentor, you’ll:

• Get to rub elbows with other new media geniuses and learn some techniques at a mentor-training workshop at the Atwater library.
• Learn how to write fun and easy to implement lesson plans for skill-building workshops that will be added to the library’s workshop repository.
• Collaborate and learn from our staff workshop coordinators, in advance of any workshops you teach or help teach, to develop exciting ideas and approaches.
• Gain teaching experience.
• Get a chance to get creatively involved with your community.

In exchange, we expect our volunteer mentors to:

• Be available for scheduled meetings with workshop coordinators prior to any workshops that you’re going to be teaching (don’t worry, we’ll warn you well in advance).
• Arrive punctually and be respectful of coordinators, other mentors and the workshop participants.
• Respect any rules, regulations or disciplinary systems used within the groups in which you are teaching.
• Treat all project participants with respect and integrity.

(Which, of course, will be no big deal.)