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!

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.