jlearn2.0

For some holiday flickr fun, check out this digital greeting card and its associated site:

MatzoGami slideshow (note: it plays slightly out of sequence)
MatzoGami site on flickr

Photos attributed to P&L Personality Plugin.

Looking for resources on Passover? Click on over to New Jewish Education, where Saul Kaiserman recommends a number of educational sites for Pesach. See especially the Jewish Agency for Israel’s online resource center, which houses materials in English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish.

Educators are using blogs as a means to develop reading, writing, and information and communication technology (ICT) literacies. Blogs also provide a forum for collaboration, information gathering, knowledge building, and publishing.

Below are a few examples of how blogs can be integrated into Jewish educational settings:

• Students in a writing class use blogs as their personal notebooks to share with their teacher for feedback on content and writing skills. The teacher and other students in their writing groups provide comments to help the authors refine, clarify, and strengthen their ideas. The blog preserves a running commentary as the work is created. Students also use images, original videos and podcasts to help tell their stories and to develop visual literacy and communications skills.
• A Jewish history class creates a “you are there” blog in which they write from the perspective of famous personalities or from a specific historical period.
• Learners in a North American class collaborate with Israeli counterparts to compare and contrast their everyday lives. Learners interview their grandparents and other older adults about their experiences growing up Jewish at a particular time or place. These interviews are edited and presented as video clips or audiocasts. Students track their families’ immigration patterns on Google Earth and link it to their blog.
• Jewish family educators post weekly guides related to the Torah portion for family discussions around the dinner table. Families build on this material, sharing their insights and related family customs with each other online.
• Congregational school students use a blog to continue their work on class social action projects even though they are not in the school building.
• A Hebrew language class practices their oral and written skills by producing podcasts and accompanying written materials in Hebrew. They exchange messages with native Hebrew speakers, discuss topics of mutual interest, and share photographs related to these topics through Flickr.
• Administrators post weekly updates about school events. Teachers use the blog to remind students and their families about homework assignments and keep them abreast of class projects.
• A beginning teacher in a day school keeps a blog journal that he shares with his mentor. The teacher journals about challenges he is facing in his new position. Each week he chooses a particular area to develop. His mentor reacts to his postings by providing feedback and perspective based on her own experiences. The teacher posts video clips of this work to his blog and reflects on what he had planned and what occurred in practice. Similarly, his mentor can post video clips that demonstrate alternate methodologies.

Feel free to share your own ideas!

Jeff Utecht is an educator who publishes two blogs: U Tech Tips and The Thinking Stick. Jeff created general tutorials on the use of flickr and del.icio.us for the educational community. These tutorials are available from his blogs under “screencasts.” He also posted the tutorials on YouTube:

Using flickr
Using del.icio.us

The segments were created in March 2006 and each runs approximately 8 minutes. Although new features have been added to these tools, the clips remain good introductions.

In addition to providing content, these tutorials are examples of how tools like YouTube can be used for professional development.

There are a number of ways to use Flickr in educational settings, as discussed previously. Here is a short tutorial to show some features.

Go to the Flickr home page and try this out: in the search area, type the word “synagogue” and hit Go. This will call up photographs collected on Flickr that are accessible to the public which are tagged by the word “synagogue.” These photos can be sorted by “most relevant,” “most recent,” and “most interesting.” The photographs are also categorized by Groups (shared collections of similarly tagged photographs in one place) and People. Searches can be refined using Advanced Search to include photos that are available for use according to specific licensing agreements.

But wait, there’s more!

Users can take advantage of the bonus map feature. Many of the “synagogue” entries are tagged with a “geotag” designation by the person who uploaded them. Geotags allow users to call up photographs from specific regions around the world. Go to Explore and select World Map. Once the map downloads, enter “synagogue” in the search box and click Go. The search will return an interactive map of images of synagogues around the world. Click around the photos and become acquainted with different architectural styles across the continents. Try out other key words to help illustrate the Jewish experience around the world. Have students upload images of their family in a private section and geotag the pictures to depict immigration patterns. Share this project with Jewish students around the world to trace commonalities and differences.

Flickr is a free image management and organization tool. Most people use it to upload and share their photographs, but other images like digital art, clip art, and primary documents can be uploaded as well. These images can be grouped into online albums (“sets”) and slide shows, and shared publicly or with a select guest list. In addition, Flickr provides tools with which users can create captions and add comments to these images. Educators are using Flickr to promote visual literacy; support history, social studies, and math curriculum; and develop digital storytelling projects. Examples of how Flickr can be used with primary documents and photographs can be found at jlearn2.0 at Flickr. Click on each image for more details.

There are a number of places to find images related to Jewish life. Below are a few suggestions to get started - also check online archives and museums.

Jacob Richman has collected a number of “hot sites” of Jewish interest, including links to Jewish clip art and photographs that depict every day life (neighborhoods, shopping, arts and crafts) and special events (holidays, aliyah, snow in Jerusalem) in Israel. See especially Jacob Richman’s Jerusalem Picture Gallery and Jacob Richman’s Ma’aleh Adumim Picture Gallery.

Panoramic images provide viewers with a more immersive experience. Take a look at the Israel Panorama Gallery, especially the Bedouin Goat Market and The Shuk! which create environments through interaction, images and sounds.

3D Israel Virtual Tours of Israel represent another type of learning experience.

Be sure to become familiar with fair use and copyright issues. American Memory provides a good overview and the Creative Commons section at Flickr discusses licensing issues and options and offers links to images according to licensure.

Start your own image collection on Flickr or a similar site!