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!

My Big Takeaways from the TTF

I am excited about the idea of introducing video-making into the classroom.  I think the kids are really going to enjoy it and I think that the various cuts done in film open up possibilities for exploring various ways to interpret and understand the Torah text.  Ideally, I would want my students to be as independent as possible with the editing and posting of video, music and pdf's.  As I ease into this, I imagine that I will be handling a lot of the final production elements and am a bit concerned about how much time that will take.  I think that I would benefit from further exploration of easy to use technology for the students to be empowered to complete the project themselves.

Wikispaces is a great, simple to use tool for my classroom.  I have been sending out weekly e-mails with assignments and class summaries but would be better served compiling it all onto wiki.