Take a Module and Make It Yours

Download, customize with AI, and put your own version online — no coding · ~8 min read

Every learning module on this site can be downloaded — each one is a single, self-contained web page — and that’s on purpose. Take one, change it to fit your students, and, if you like, put your own version online for them to use. None of it requires you to be technical. As with everything here, an AI assistant like Claude can walk you through each step in plain language and untangle anything that snags. Here’s the whole path, start to finish.

Step 1 · What you downloaded

When you click Download on a module, you get one .html file: a complete, self-contained web page. There’s nothing to install. (The one thing to know — each module pulls a couple of common code libraries from the internet when it opens, so it needs a connection to run; but everything else lives inside that single file.) If you grabbed a whole toolkit as a .zip, unzip it and you’ll find one of these files for each module.

Step 2 · Open it

Double-click the .html file. It opens in your web browser and runs exactly as it does on this site — you can use it straight away. To peek at what’s inside, you can open the same file in any plain-text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on a Mac), but the easiest way to change anything is to hand the file to an AI and describe what you want.

Step 3 · Change it with AI

Open a chat with an AI assistant, attach or paste the module’s .html file, and tell it what to change in plain English. It rewrites the file and gives it back; you save the new version and open it to check. Go back and forth as many times as you like.

Example promptHere’s an interactive learning module (an HTML file). Please change all the example sources in it to ones about [my topic], keep everything else the same, and give me back the complete updated file.

Common changes teachers ask for: swapping the examples for ones from their own curriculum or country; simplifying (or raising) the reading level; switching the citation style shown; translating the interface into another language; or changing the title, colors, and school name.

Example promptIn this module, change the citation examples from MLA to APA and simplify the language for younger students. Return the complete file.

One habit to keep: open the new file and click all the way through it before you use it. AI edits are fast but not infallible, and you want to stand behind what it teaches.

Step 4 · Put your version online (free, with GitHub Pages)

Once you have a version you like, you may want it on the web so students open it with a link instead of a file. The simplest free way is GitHub Pages — a service that hosts plain web pages at no cost and gives you a public address. Here’s the whole thing. If any screen looks unfamiliar, describe it to your AI assistant and ask “what do I click here?” — that alone gets most people through it.

  1. Make a free account at github.com.
  2. Create a repository (a “repo” is just a project folder): click the + at the top right → New repository. Give it a short, lowercase name like research-skills, set it to Public, tick Add a README file, and click Create repository.
  3. Upload your file: on the repo page, click Add file → Upload files, and drag your edited .html in. Helpful trick: if you rename your file to index.html, it becomes the page that opens automatically. Click Commit changes.
  4. Turn on Pages: open Settings (top of the repo) → Pages (left sidebar). Under “Build and deployment,” set Source to Deploy from a branch, choose the main branch and the / (root) folder, and click Save.
  5. Get your link: wait a minute or two, refresh that Pages settings screen, and your public address appears — it looks like https://yourname.github.io/research-skills/. If you named your file index.html, that link opens it directly; otherwise add the file name to the end. Share it with your students.
Example prompt — for any step that stallsI’m setting up GitHub Pages to host an HTML file and I’m on the [describe what you see] screen. What do I do next?
Why GitHub Pages works hereIt hosts “static” pages — ones that don’t need a server running behind them. These modules are exactly that, so they’re a perfect fit. (If you ever want to host something with a database or a login behind it, that’s a bigger undertaking — the world of the Koha guide and your own server.)
Other ways to share

GitHub Pages isn’t the only route. Many school platforms — Google Classroom, Moodle, Canvas — let you upload an .html file or link to one. And if you run your own server, you can simply drop the file there (the Koha guide is the deep end of that pool). GitHub Pages is just the easiest free way to get a public link when you don’t have a machine of your own.

That’s the full loop: download, make it yours with an AI, and put it where your students can reach it — all without writing a line of code. The modules are yours to remix; this is how.

Browse the modules to download →