Zainab Oni is part of the MOUSE Corps and is also a summer intern with Hive NYC. She is a teen news contributor to the Huffington Post, and hopes to go to M.I.T. to study electrical and computer engineering. She is also featured in Mozilla’s ‘Meet the Webmakers’ Video.

Technology isn’t something that I really expressed an interest in until recently. As a matter of fact, the word “technology” didn’t become a part of my vocabulary until I became a student at Hudson High School of Learning Technologies. I started to really notice the involvement of technology in our/my world when my high school informed the students that we were to use laptops as learning tools in classrooms rather than traditional textbooks. I thought my principal was crazy at first (no offense) but as time passed, I became more interested and involved in technology. Using the Internet started to mean more than just social media and it started involving research, online classes and creating and sharing what we made. I started using different tools on the web such as JayCut, Glogster, Prezi, K12, etc.

Since I began to develop interest in technology, I decided to join the MOUSE Squad in my school. It’s a group of students that serve as in-house technicians for the school, helping with daily tech maintenance and troubleshooting wireless and equipment issues. Gradually, I started getting into creating and designing technology, which inevitably led to webmaking. Earlier this year, I was also trained on how to use and teach others about X-Ray Goggles, a web tool that allows people to “hack” or remix a website by letting you see what web pages are made of and then putting in your own text and images. This was when I first started thinking about how to not only use the web, but to start making the web. From then on, I just basically started grabbing every opportunity I could to develop and gather more skills as a webmaker.

(continued…)

Read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zainab-oni/dont-be-a-user-be-a-maker_b_1707877.html