Using Technology in Course Planning

The Teaching and Technology Fellowship really allowed me to think about how I want to teach for the upcoming year.  Because the school year for the courses I teach ended during the Fellowship, I focused myself on planning for the next school year. 

As some background information, I teach at a Reform synagogue, a Pre-Confirmation class made up of 7th, 8th and 9th grade students.  The structure of the curriculum is flexible and as a faculty we look for opportunities to engage students in Jewish Learning that interests them.

Teaching two courses each year allowed me to consider many different methods.  The first course I planned out was Jews in the News which was focusing more on the content creating aspect of the iPad technology.  Students would access a webquest for the instructions on their task to create a newscast each class about a current event item in Israel or an issue that effects Jewish people.  By using articles found on the internet they would produce a newscast using Tellagmi, iMovie or the green screen application.  The newscasts would be shared on the Temple webpage.

The second course focused on technology as a way of presenting and organizing class materials.  Using Jews on television to explore stereotypes of Jews, students would view select television episodes and through class discussion look for the different ways in which Jews are portrayed.  The introductory lesson, which is linked below, provides several short YouTube clips of some of the shows we would view. Students would be asked to use those clips to brainstorm some of the stereotypes that we might be exploring.

Introductory Lesson Prezi - still in progress but a GREAT start!

During each class discussion we would take notes using Popplet so that at the end of the seven-week course we would have a web of all the sterotryes discussed and examples from more than one television show for each.

Using technology to plan out the courses was in some ways easier than I had expected.  Creating a Prezi was more challenging than I had anticipated and it took me at least 3 tries to be satisfied with what I had created. This could be due to my status as a novice Prezi user.  Its a good thing I have a few more months before class starts to make improvements!

Reflections on the TTF Class by Bailee Star

 Corps Project--Popplet and Wikipages:

As an Education Director, I've struggled with how to present our innovative pilot project.  Our project uses a Corps model, where we link a grade with a committee in order to learn about what the committee does as well as how, when, what and why they do it.  The families learn together along with older members of the congregation.  They're able to learn about our Jewish values through experiential means.

This visual organizer is an important first step in presenting the greater temple community with a flow of the work throughout the religious school.  Others can see the holistic nature of our work and the project will gain more visibility in the greater temple community.  I plan to use this visual organizer on our new website--perhaps placing video in the boxes as I get more documentation on the projects.

Here is the Popplet for the Temple Shir Tikvah Corps Project:

I made wikipages for three of the TST corps in the project as well. I plan to finish those pages as we complete other activities toward the end of the year. I plan to use the Popplet as an introductory page and hopefully link the wikipages in the individual popplet boxes. These would be on the website as soon as the material goes live.  I hope to make three more wikipages for the three remaining corps as well.  I would use this information to link from the grade-based information sheets that are sent to parents.  We usually use the first parent education session to tell them about the Corps project for their grade.  With this information distributed ahead of time online, we would use our family education time to learn each other's stories and develop relational bonds.

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+4th+Grade+Caring+Corps

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+5th+Grade+Tefillah+Corps

http://cjpttfipad.wikispaces.com/Temple+Shir+Tikvah+7th+Grade+Tikkun+Olam+Corps

My goal is to use the iPads frequently during weekday religious school.  Students are often exhausted when they come right from school and the iPads offer an attractive solution to differentiating learning and offering students an exciting way to access the learning material.  Most recently, the fifth graders looked for innovations in Israel as part of our Israel activities leading up to our Israeli Shuk day.