jlearn2.0

Be sure to take a look at AVI CHAI’s Educational Technology Experiments blog. The current cohort of AVI CHAI technology grant recipients is using the blog to post about their experiences as they move their projects from proposal concept to reality.

Projects include: using digital cameras, laptops, and computer projectors to enhance Jewish learning; developing customizable software for Jewish text studies; integrating Bible and ancient history studies; creating Hebrew language articles and integrating Hebrew into school presentations; enhancing prayer and siddur skills; establishing a digital school system; integrating Tablet PCs and SMARTBoards into Judaic studies; creating webcasts, podcasts, slideshows, and videos for the school community; technology planning and implementation; and more…

These postings provide important insights into educational project development. They also serve to showcase the variety of projects that are being piloted. Most importantly, the postings celebrate the talents and visions of Jewish day school educators in North America who are so willing to share their experiences with others.

New entries are posted periodically, so check in regularly, or better yet, add the AVI CHAI blog to your aggregator.

Educators in Jewish settings who are not able to attend NECC have asked to participate in the conference virtually. If you are attending the conference and would like to share your notes and reflections on sessions with others through posts on this blog, please contact jlearn2.0.

In addition, if you would like to contribute an article or other type of posting to jlearn2.0, we welcome your ideas!

The Jewish Educators Network will meet at NECC in Atlanta on Monday, June 25, 5:30-6:30pm, Room B201. Please join us for an opportunity to network and share. The session is open to anyone interested in the integration of technology in Jewish learning settings, including general and Judaic subjects.

Please note that the meeting time overlaps with the concurrent Birds of a Feather sessions, which run from 4:45-6:30pm. This will give those who wish to attend a Birds session an opportunity to spend some time there before joining us at 5:30pm.

The session is listed in the NECC online program planner – it can be found and added to your program plan by scrolling to the section labeled “Category and Subcategory” and selecting “Meeting/Focused Gathering” from the pull-down menu.

Colleagues noted the following topics of interest:

• SMARTBoards and other interactive white boards
• Podcasting, videocasting
• blogs and wikis
• laptops vs. tablets
• stationary labs vs. mobile labs
• one to one computing

In addition, we are pleased to present the published version of the White Paper: Jewish Learning in the Digital Age, which was discussed at last year’s meeting.

The session will be co-moderated by Caren Levine, jlearn2.0 and etheoreal; and Sara Seligson, BJE of Greater New York. Many thanks to NECC for providing this venue!

Below is an article by Karen Guth, the English teacher at Neveh Channah who participated in this award-winning international project. Karen offers a description of the schools’ collaborative work, both online and off. She also shares additional reflections on the impact of the project on the students.

The collaborative project has provided my 10th grade students at Neveh Channah a chance to share their Bagrut [high school matriculation certificate]research projects with students all over the world, specifically with a group of high school students in Montreal at the Lower Canada College. We collaborated with the 9th grade English class of Mrs. Sharon Peters who has been working with Neveh Channah teachers for four years. It has also afforded our students the opportunity to expose the young people in North America to our values, our love of our country, and our culture, while enhancing our students’ English writing and analytical skills and bringing them in contact with the culture and values of Canadian society.

The staff at the Ulpana at Neveh Channah decided to combine the English Bagrut project with the collaborative project in the 10th grade English Speakers’ class. At first the task seemed a bit overwhelming since I, as a substitute teacher for the year, knew the requirements for the Bagrut research project but, was not sure how to combine that with the goals of the collaborative project.

We decided to choose a subject that was broad and had a variety of topics as well as one that lent itself to dialogue with students outside of Israel. We chose, “Jerusalem”. Our students could select any person, place, historical period, or organization that was connected to Jerusalem.

We sent a letter to the parents explaining the goals of the collaborative project. In the letter we also told them about the unique opportunity our young people had to enhance their English research and writing skills as well as doing “hasbara [advocacy]” for our country through a dialogue with young people on the other side of the world.

Both schools studied some literary works by, Zelda and Yehuda Amichai about Jerusalem. The Canadian students posted on their wiki a video clip expressing some of their reactions to the pieces we read. We also read some literature about Canada that they sent to us.

We organized and filmed a tour of Jerusalem in which we visited many of the places our students researched. They had the opportunity to share, orally, information from their projects with their classmates, as well as the Canadian students, during this tour.

Our students had to write and re-write their projects until they could put them on the “wiki” (their website which is part of the larger website) for others to read. Mrs. Peters in Canada gave her students an assignment to read at least one project. They had to write what they learned from the project, ask questions, and critique it. She created a rubric, which she used to grade their comments (www.mtl-peters.net/rubricNCresearch.htm). Our students then had to read the comments and answer the questions. This required that they do more research, explain their projects more clearly, and of course write all of their responses in English.

I would say that this became a project that engaged the minds, skills, and hearts of our students. It turned the English Bagrut project into an international research, writing, thinking, and teaching opportunity.

Thanks to Sharon Peters of LCC. Her input and participation has been essential to the success of our students’ communication, learning, and inspiration. Please take a moment to look at the wiki that her students have created at: montreal.wikispaces.com, to get an idea of the activities and literary pieces she has posted. One of the pieces, “Pastel Nazis”, we read in class as a Yom Hashoah [Holocaust Remembrance Day] activity.

We have been fortunate to have people who are committed to this program. A special thank you to Reuven Werber, the computer technology director at Neveh Channah. We learned every aspect of creating the wiki from Reuven. He also filmed our trip and created the movie on our website. The combination of these two projects brought our students’ English skills to life within a meaningful and engaging format. Check out our site!

Here is the front page of our project wiki:

http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com

Here is the page with the list of students Research projects:

http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com/Research+Projects

–Karen Guth, Neveh Channah

More good news! The Neveh Channah (Israel) – LCC (Canada) project cited in our April 18, 2007 post was awarded the second place ISTE Online Learning Award (Telelearning Special Interest Group).The international project, From Jerusalem to Montreal, is a collaboration of high school English students and their teachers. We asked the faculty involved to share their reflections on the project so far.

Karen Guth, an English teacher at Neveh Channah, considered how the project exceeded their original expectations:

“I would say that this became a project that engaged the minds, skills and hearts of our students. It turned the English Bagrut [high school matriculation certificate] project into an international research, writing, thinking, and teaching opportunity.”

Her colleague, Reuven Werber, Educational Technology Coordinator at Neveh Channah, noted how new technologies helped to create a sustained learning community that was engaged in authentic work and cultural exchange:

“I think that the use of web 2.0 technology to span the globe helped the Neveh Channah students and those of LCC to learn about each other’s culture and way of life as well as to cooperate in creating some authentic learning. They learned that people on other sides of the world could make that world smaller by using technology to communicate and work together. By knowing that their work was to be viewed and reviewed by their peers they were motivated to produce good work. The Neveh Channah students were very happy to have the chance to share their love of Israel and Jerusalem with their partners in Canada and other visitors to their wiki project. Working together with Sharon Peters, a good ‘virtual’ friend and partner, was, as usual, a rewarding experience for the Israeli staff.”

Sharon Peters, the English instructor at LCC, was also proud of the collaborative work both schools accomplished:

“This project challenged my students to demonstrate higher order critical thinking skills as they reflected upon not only their own culture and literature, but the culture and literature of a very different country. They exercised excellent peer review and evaluation skills as they provided feedback to the students at Neveh Channah High School about their research projects. Not only did they provide excellent reviews, but they did so with great poise and sensitivity. What an excellent educational opportunity that just could not have taken place within the walls of just our own classroom! I owe a great deal of thanks to Karen Guth and Reuven Werber for their patience as we worked with very different holiday schedules and a number of unanticipated hurdles. They were fantastic collaborative teacher partners.”

The project will be highlighted at a poster session at this year’s NECC conference in Atlanta – be sure to check it out. And visit the wiki sites:

Lower Canada College: http://montreal.wikispaces.com
Neveh Channah: http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com

Neveh Channah students recently posted their reactions to “Pastel Nazis,” a Canadian short story chosen by LCC students at http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com/Pastel+Nazis in commemoration of this year’s Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

For further information, contact:

Sharon Peters at sharonpeters@gmail.com and Reuven Werber at reuw@nevnet.etzion.k12.il

Skype is a software application that provides voice over internet protocol (VoIP) functionality. In other words, it’s a program that allows users to make free or low-cost telephone calls over the Internet. Skype is being used by the educational community in a number of ways, including intercultural projects, distance learning, and professional development. Users can also integrate additional tools, such as whiteboards, to create a more robust means of multimedia communication.

Intercultural Projects and Second Language Development

Educators are experimenting with Skype to enhance learning, particularly for intercultural programs. The CultureQuest Project, for example, encourages the study of different cultures. The project guide offers suggestions about how to interact with students in other countries using tools like Skype to organize international videoconferences with other classes and with experts in the field. CultureQuest is a project of the Center for School Development, School of Education, City College of the City University of New York.

Schools and independent learners are also using Skype to practice their language skills. In addition to more conventional “twinning projects,” there are sites that match up native language speakers with those who want practice their language skills; consider the use of Hebrew and English exchanges, for example.

Professional Development

Skype provides the ability to hold conference calls, or Skypecasts, that can be employed for professional development, resource sharing, and conference planning. These calls can also be saved as audio files and posted online for listeners to download. As a point of ethics and etiquette, participants should be made aware if the calls will be accessible to the public. The 2006 K-12 Online Conference sponsored a 24 hour Skypecast, a podcast of which can be found at Wesley Fryer’s blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity (to see how this event was organized, see the moderator page of the K-12 Online wiki).

EdTechtalk sponsors a number of live webcasts for communities of educators, many of which are broadcast on a regular weekly basis and are open to participants all over the world.

Distance Learning / Accessible Learning

iLearnTorah is an online bat/ bar mitzvah tutoring service that makes use of video-enabled Skype to conduct sessions. Students work with experienced teachers to learn Torah and Haftorah and to create personal learning projects. The program is run under the advisement of Josh Lauffer, a Jewish educator and musician, and Dr. Yossi Chajes, faculty in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa.

The video below, “Inclusion,” demonstrates a powerful use of Skype videoconferencing that makes learning more accessible to students. Produced by a fourth grade class, it tells the story of how the Agnes Risley School was able to embrace a student who had a serious illness and could not attend classes onsite:

The Neveh Channah (Israel) – LCC (Canada) project is an exciting example of what talented high school educators and students can create together with support from Web 2.0 tools. The program is sponsored by the Israel Ministry of Education under the auspices of its Israeli Pedagogic Collaborative Learning Network.

The project topic for this year is Jerusalem, City of Hope. The group is studying poetry, song, and speeches. They are researching a variety of topics related to Jerusalem, including history, biographies, politics, literature, and art. The project illustrates how wikis can be used as platforms for meaningful communications and collaboration in learning.

Reuven Werber, the coordinator for Neveh Channah, writes:

We have been studying each other’s literature, learning about each other’s culture, participating in each other’s tours (via Google Video embedding) and most recently, LCC students have been peer reviewing our students’ English Language matriculation projects (bagrut) for formative assessment purposes.

The project wikis are found at:

Neveh Channah: http://jerusalem.wikispaces.com
Lower Canada College: http://montreal.wikispaces.com

See especially the LCC Responses Video which describes the project in more detail.

The project was featured in a recent presentation by Sharon Peters of Lower Canada College which can be found on the 3Cs wiki. Be sure to read through the entire presentation which offers insights into Web 2.0 and pedagogy and take note of the section, “What are some classroom practices,” which highlights the LCC and Neveh Channah School project. There is also a blurb in Hebrew about the project on the MOFET Institute’s Teachers College Education site.

Karen Guth, an English teacher at Neveh Channah, was a partner in the project as well. The initiative serves as a model for how a curricular content teacher and pedagogical technology coordinator can work together to create meaningful educational projects employing cutting edge technology.

For further information, contact:

Reuven Werber, Educational Technology Coordinator, Neveh Channah High School, Israel; National Instructor, IPNCL Project at reuw@nevnet.etzion.k12.il

Sharon Peters, English Instructor, Lower Canada College at sharonpeters@gmail.com