jlearn2.0

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

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

The Lippman Kanfer Institute is an action-oriented think tank for innovation in Jewish learning and engagement. It recently developed a wiki through which to disseminate its work and to elicit feedback. The Institute’s first major initiative is “Redesigning Jewish Education for the 21st Century,” an opportunity to map out an agenda and strategy for ensuring that Jewish education is maximally effective and relevant in the new century. Among the issues raised are how new media can be employed for Jewish education and change, and how the new media culture provides new perspectives on Jewish learning.

More information about this project can be found on the wiki. To participate, contact Dr. Jonathan Woocher, Director, Lippman Kanfer Institute. The Lippman Kanfer Institute is affiliated with JESNA.

Two interesting quotes from recent books:

From The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Release 2.0 by Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 (pp. 10-11):

The flat-world platform is the product of a convergence of the personal computer (which allowed every individual suddenly to become the author of his or her own content in digital form) with fiber-optic cable (which suddenly allowed all those individuals to access more and more digital content around the world for next to nothing) with the rise of work flow software (which enabled individuals all over the world to collaborate on the same digital content from anywhere, regardless of the distances between them). No one anticipated this convergence. It just happened – right around the year 2000. And when it did, people all over the world started waking up and realizing that they had more power than ever to go global as individuals, they needed more than ever to think of themselves as individuals competing against other individuals all over the planet, and they had more opportunities to work with those other individuals, not just compete with them. As a result, every person now must, and can, ask: Where do I as an individual fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?”

From Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Penguin, 2006 (p. 67):

In its purest form,[peer production]is a way of producing goods and services that relies entirely on self-organizing, egalitarian communities of individuals who come together voluntarily to produce a shared outcome. In reality, peer production mixes elements of hierarchy and self-organization and relies on meritocratic principles of organization – i.e., the most skilled and experienced members of the community provide leadership and help integrate contributions from the community.

There has been some preliminary discussion about issues of technology innovation, peer collaboration and hierarchies on the jlearn2.0 wiki.

Although the books cited above refer primarily to corporate culture, practical implications for Jewish education, particularly for peer collaboration, are intriguing. How does this mesh with Jewish educational values? What are some challenges? Do these concepts carry over into the offline world?

Ideas? Comments?

A recent posting on the jlearn2.0 wiki noted the difficulty of introducing the use of a new technology, in this case, a wiki. In theory, the use of the wiki would seem to be a natural tool for collaboration on a project by colleagues who are already familiar with one another but who are geographically dispersed. In reality, there can be great challenges in introducing and implementing any kind of change, no matter how seemingly slight, even under the best of circumstances.

What are some of the challenges you have come across? How have you addressed them?

How are educators thinking about blogs?

Blogs are generally considered to be online journals. In terms of format, they are made up of entries that are organized chronologically, the most recent listed first, and can be further indexed by topic. Blogs often include a mixture of text content, audio, photographs, videos, and links to other sites. Blog culture encourages reader comments, cross-references to other blogs, and opportunities for collaborative publishing. A blog’s relative ease of use provides a publishing forum for anyone with an Internet connection and the patience to learn a new medium.

Educators are experimenting with the use of blogs in their work and have coined the term “edublogs.” Many of these projects use the traditional concept of blogs in highly creative ways.

Below are ways to think about genres of blogs in education. Please note that it is not clear that all of these types of blogs currently exist for Jewish education. However, with your assistance, we will try and identify examples of the variety of Jewish education blogs on the jlearn2.0 wiki (jlearn20.wikispaces.com; see under “Jewish Education Blogs.” Or add your blog suggestion in the comment section at the bottom of this post or email us at jlearn2.0. More about wikis in future posts).

General for Educational Stakeholders

Blogs about Jewish education – these sites tend to offer information, resources, policy, advocacy, and commentary related to aspects of Jewish education.

Personal voices – independent voices examining issues related to Jewish education; sometimes articles related to Jewish education are posted on individuals’ blogs that address a wide range of topics on Jewish culture.

Educator Blogs

Teacher journals – online diaries describing personal experiences and commentary by educators; these are often projects initiated by individuals and not under school auspices.

Administrator journals – online diaries that share perspectives and experiences of school administrators; these are often personal journals and not under school auspices.

Professional development – sites that provide “just in time” and individualized learning opportunities; blogs that support reflective practice through journaling, feedback, etc.

Communities of practice – sites devoted to specific issues related to the profession; collaborative spaces to share and refine ideas

Student Blogs

Student journals – online entries describing personal experiences and observations by students; these might be self-initiated diaries or related to school projects.

Curricular Resources

Online resource centers – access to curricular resources, annotated links to content and pedagogy, repository for original resources.

Learning Blogs

Student learning – curriculum-related blogs created for, and often by, students to engage with learning through writing, information and communication technology (ICT) skills, podcasts, videocasts, map tools, multimedia presentations and projects, etc.

Digital portfolios – blogs developed for assessing learning including presentation of work, revisions, critiques, and personal reflections.

Community

School collaborations – online space for classroom projects, including those that are inter-class, inter-school, and international.

Mentorships – shared collaborative space for online mentorships, including student-mentor and teacher- mentor relationships.

Travel journals – reports from travelers around the world, interacting with readers who share their experiences virtually.

Social action blogs – sites that promote Jewish social action and related projects.

School Blogs

Schools and other institutions of higher learning – school communications shared by the administration, teachers, parents, and students (school news, homework, assignments, important bulletins, messages from the head of school and rabbi, etc.)

Organization / Institution Affiliated Blogs

Organizations – blogs associated with institutions and organizations; these sites are often developed in conjunction with their organizational websites and offer additional, more regularly updated information and resources of interest to their membership.

Conference Blogs

Conferences – official and unofficial reports and insights related to conference events by organizers and participants.

Do other categories come to mind? How do you use blogs in your work?

Administrators and teachers should be reminded that appropriate security measures need to be taken to assure student safety and privacy. For example, blogs can be kept private with only pre-identified members granted permission to read or post comments. A simple way to protect the student is to have them use a pen name for any work that is publicly accessible. The school community should be aware of the school’s acceptable use policies and should develop appropriate rules of netiquette.