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!

Initial Uses of Technology in My Own Teaching

This year, as I began to learn with TTF, I integrated technology in two ways. I created flashcards on the website we learned about for my 3rd grade Hebrew class and with my 6th graders, we used Quia.com to create an end of the year Jew-pardy game to review the year's learning with the 4/5th graders who the 6th graders were sharing their learning with throughout the year. In both cases, I saw how much more excited and engaged the students were. They all thought that using computers in class was very cool and their energy around learning and participation was markedly different.
One of the projects that I have devised for my 5-7th graders for next year (as a part of our new Project Based Learning curriculum) is a Digital Midrash project. This project will be presented with them with a Prezi (created on prezi.com), one of my favorite on-line teaching tools. I used Prezis with my Adult Ed course this year and they LOVED the slide presentations (and a Prezi is SOOOOOO much easier to create than a Power Point!). The Digital Midrash project will encourage the students to use a variety of the technology tools/ideas I learned about in TTF this year including (but not limited to): word clouds, timelines, Ted Talks, Blogs/Vlogs, and more! I'm very much looking forward to sharing the Prezi with the TTF class and to getting their feedback on how I can make this lesson even better before sharing it with the students next year!

Prezi on The Book of Esther and Historical Contextualization

Hannah Lindholm and I created this prezi in order to explore the historical contextualization of the book of Esther. It is meant to be a way for a teacher to guide the students in an active text study and exploration of the book. It is very much a work in progress.

Presenting on EdTech at Jewish Learning Connections Showcase

This past Sunday I had the pleasure of presenting about my work at Temple Ohabei Shalom, and the planning and research we all do through the Teaching and Technology fellowship. In the Prezi above, I touch on maximizing instructional time, using resources fully, and figuring out answers to the question

How can the Divine rest between two people when they are miles apart, connecting through satellites?

While this presentation is mostly images, check out the screen captures of students at the Ansin Religious School connecting on Schoology and discussing a midrash, and a video of our 7th grade students discussing their b'not mitzvah projects and coming to really insightful conclusions.