Initial Technology Ideas

by Lauren Lichtel

Beth El Temple Center, Belmont, MA

Sunday School 2nd grade teacher
Hebrew School 3rd grade teacher
CJP TTF: Cohort 6

My second grade class studies many different subjects over the course of the year. Some of them include Israel, mitzvot, holidays/calendar, Hebrew, God, prayers, and much more. 


For this blog, I will be describing my plan for my plan for the Israel project. After my students finish learning all about Israel from the book, I want them to be able to create something. Create a video or some kind. They will be able to use one or all of the apps that we've used here in this class. 

For example, they can use the Puppet Pals and have a couple of characters take a trip through Israel as they explain what it is they see. They could use the app Garage Band and create a song about Israel. They can use Explain Everything to create a lesson for their classmates about something they've learned. Really, the possibilities are endless. 

After the students are done with these projects, which may take a couple weeks to complete, I will post them on our class website for the parents to check out! I really think this is going to be a wonderful project! I cannot wait to begin!

Course Reflections - Teaching and Technology Fellowship

I went into this class looking for ways to reach students; to differentiate the way information is presented, excite students about learning and grow as an educator.  Nearly three months later, I can look back at the work I have done and reflect that I really have accomplished those goals. 

The moment you even say the word iPad students change their body language in class, begin to pay attention to the instructions and start creating new ideas.  It's like giving students freedom to be themselves while learning. In only the few classes we held after getting the iPads, I could see the difference in the students.  They were eager to know what we were doing and how it would include the iPads. This excitement was rare previously but was refreshing to witness.

There is also a distinct value in exploration that the use of the iPad easily allows in the classroom.  Connect to the internet and you can find information about anything.  Students are great at using Google but not always so great at deciding which information is accurate and reliable.  Being able to research on your own helps to harbor interest in the subject and ownership of your own learning. Being able to create something interesting to you and appropriate for your level of understanding and abilities is invaluable and bringing technology into the classroom helps to make that goal a reality.

I find myself browsing through apps in the AppStore often, looking for new things and thinking about how they can be used in improve my teaching.  Not take the place of teaching as many would have you believe.  I often ask myself what purpose the app would serve; would it be for my own organization of materials, for a class presentation, to send home to families or for a student project?  Each use has its own value and there are many apps that fall into the categories I have devised. I even bought extra Cloud storage just so that I wouldn't have to get rid of anything! 

Technology in the classroom is really about so much more though.  Through this experience I have decided that a significant advantage to technology in the classroom is the way it helps to communicate what learning took place.  Technology can often provide evidence of learning which can be sent or posted to share with families.  Students who are excited about the learning opportunities they experienced are more likely to share with the adults they live with about what they learned than just report that their day was "OK".  The community can be better involved with the education of our students by witnessing student ability through these products.

To me this course was really a catalyst, a jumping off point, for changing the way I teach and the way I hope students will learn. Five classes and some CloudWork certainly does not make me an expert on anything but it points me in the right direction to improve as an educator and provide opportunities to students that are engaging and informative.  I know where to look for new ideas and how to change my thinking about topics.  For students, it is less about what you know at the end of a course and more about how you learned it.  

Big Ideas from the TTF Seminars--Sari Fein

I have taken away three primary ideas about using technology for learning. One, technology is adaptable for almost any age, ability level, and topic. In particular, apps that are used for presentation, such as "Explain Everything," are extremely versatile. Two, there is a wealth of resources provided by other educators, even Jewish educators, who are using technology in the classroom. Through sites such as Pinterest, Diigo, and the "blogosphere," I am easily able to connect to educators from across the world and learn from both their successes and their challenges in using technology. Three, technology makes differentiated and individualized learning easy. Activities can be easily tailored to meet a student's individual learning needs and style, and group work with technology brings out students' various skills in art, language, and technology.

My new insights will change my approach to teaching. I have long been a believer in collaborative, project-based learning. Yet, it is sometimes a struggle to design units and lessons that lend themselves to that type of activity. Project based learning and group work are made much easier by the use of technology. With iPads, students can research, create, and share their work using a variety of apps and other tools. The ability to share is perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of a technology-integrated classroom. Student work can be easily shared with a variety of communities--the class, the synagogue, even the larger Jewish world. Students can easily connect, share ideas, and receive feedback thanks to the power of the internet. 

My main goal for applying what I learned in the Fellowship to my teaching in the future is to more thoroughly and naturally integrate technology into my curriculum. Due to limited resources and knowledge, in the past I have used technology in only certain capacities (for research, word processing, showing videos, and working one-on-one with struggling students). I can now envision a classroom in which technology is an integral part of our learning process. For example, I plan to begin my curriculum next year with a "Discovering the World of the Bible" webquest, which will serve not only to orient my students with the iPads, but also to engage them in the content and bring it to life. This will be the foundation of what I hope will be an exciting and enriching 21st-century classroom.

Opening Staff Meeting - Sharing Our Learning from CJPTTF

In preparation for our first staff meeting of the year, our Director of Lifelong Learning, Marilyn Stern, asked Jennie and me to prepare a segment on how other teachers might benefit from what we had learned through our fellowship.  Jennie and I chose to introduce some of the tools we had found as fun and useful ways to share content.

We set the context of technology in the classroom through segments of the Youth Portrait of Cameron video and an explanation of what it means to work in the cloud, including some of the basic information needed to use the netbooks given to us from CJP and our newly purchased Chromebooks.  Jennie demonstrated Media Midrash http://mediamidrash.behrmanhouse.com/, Quizlet http://quizlet.com/, Vokis http://www.voki.com/, Diigo and Diigolet https://www.diigo.com/.  Sandy introduced Time Toast http://www.timetoast.com/,   Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html and shared the Common Craft video created on the video camera during one of our Fellowship sessions.  Several staff subsequently met with one of us to learn how to access and use the new equipment and/or use resources from the list we provided at this opening staff meeting.

Follow this link to the resource list we compiled and shared with our staff:      Technology Research and Tools                                     

4.  

CJPTTF: Take-Away Big Ideas

From the beginning, the idea of this fellowship excited me. As someone who has grown up surrounded by technology and who is just delving into teaching, the intersection of the two was a point of difficulty. I lacked ideas of how to meld the two, but I was already optimistic of the benefits the combination could impart to the classroom. Having seen how integral technology was in the lives of my students, it was crucially important that I use it to attract their attention to class.

I have learned many varied things from this fellowship. On a class wide scope, learning how to manufacture quizzes with Google documents, how to make flash cards online with quizzlet, and how to make entrancing visuals with programs such as tagxedo and wordle will all be used weekly in my class. On a macro level, our in depth exploration of the uses of wikis has inspired me to, in my role as technology coordinator for the religious school, to create a wiki for our school. This will be extremely useful to connect to parents, keep track of kids' work, and to keep track of the multiple facets of the technology we use.

I intend to use all we've learned as both a springboard for further exploration, as well as to pass it on to my fellow educators and down to my students. I hope to encourage our school as a whole to take advantage of this opportunity to forge forward, and to avoid stagnation. I am most excited to see in what ways I can use what I learned to engage my students, and to relate better to them. Many of the ideas shared with us were new and fresh to me, and I can't wait to try to fit them into a lesson plan. These ideas include web quests, vokis, online games, and the various timeline generators.

The final, critical idea I took away from the fellowship came from my own experiences learning during its duration. I discovered that technology can be a useful tool, but cannot replace classic instruction. I was reminded of the dangers of overwhelming students. I hope to avoid that pitfall, and to apply all we have looked into as part of next year’s curriculum.

Abraham's Family Tree Unit

4th Grade ~ Temple Isaiah

Over the year, 4th grade students will be exploring key texts of Bereshit from Abraham through Joseph. After the introduction and some scaffolding, students will be using a WebQuest to create Abraham’s Family Tree (from Terach through Jacob’s and Esau’s children). The Family Tree will require students to identify some middot/Jewish virtues from a partial list and explain how each middah connects to an individual and what source text student is using to support.

The whole exploration will be facilitated through a wiki (not yet created) and involve extensive use of project-based learning. The following is just the intro unit.

September 29 Genealogy – What is it?

Computer etiquette:
treating them with care; logging on; gmail a/c’s; saving & shutting down

Computer search and google doc definitions:
create your team definition of genealogy and begin building a Team Glossary – explore and add the following definitions:
ancestor, descendant, sibling, cousins, begot, family tree

Format and save file in the cloud:
identifying docs with file name & team member names

October 2 Finding Torah

How to navigate the Hebrew Bible:
3 sections: T, N, K: focus on T [Torah] ~ create list of a.k.a’s: chumash, 5 Books of Moses, 5 Books of Torah, Pentateuch, The Law,
List books in order in English: Gen, Ex, Lev, Num. Deut: English meanings (beginning; we’re out of here! laws; census, second law)
List books in order in Hebrew: Bereshit, Shemot, Vayikra, BeMidbar, D’varim ~ Hebrew meanings
Add all to their google doc Glossary


October 6 Invitation to Grade 4 Wiki

Review logging on, etc.
Explain the WebQuest idea: will complete project with team members – team to decide how to divide up work, discovering and using individual gifts, understand what project is, how project will be evaluated, resolving differences appropriately, collaboration, communication, where responsibility for learning lies; tools available for research, group work and presentations
Begin WebQuest!


October 9 Continue on WebQuest! The Family Tree of Abraham and His Future Family

October 13 - No School

October 16 Constructive criticism:
its purpose, how to offer it
Review other teams work
Class discussion on work

October 20 Consider classmates comments and decide whether or not to incorporate into project

Reminder that next Sunday will be a program with parents and students will share their family trees of Abraham and Future Family

October 23
Finish up loose ends
Last minute ideas on how to share work with all parents and rest of class

October 27 4th Gr. Family Program
Short story about where you come from; integrate Torah blessing into story (what kids have been doing in class)
Introducing the genealogy
Jewish Genealogy Expert & Clergy ~ brief introduction to what we can learn from genealogist and Clergy to specifically interact with students about what they learned from exploring Abraham’s Family Tree and how to take it further
Set up we are all responsible for one another and l’dor v’dor; bring cutting/peeling tools and veggie, cutting board and 1 recipe typed – collect and “publish” later
Stone Soup activity with soup being delivered to Bristol Lodge after program

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!

Initial Technology Ideas

These are my initial thoughts of technology applications given our current 7th grade curriculum.

Topic: Jewish Life Cycles

Lesson Layout:
Introduction of Jewish life cycles with brainstorming session to assess students' understanding

Key Technologies:
Common Craft. I can see students having a lot of fun creating their own explanations of Jewish Life Cycles using this approach. I've seen it done with drawings instead of the paper cut-outs; either way, or a combination of the two, would make this a more engaging process for the students.


Topic: Purim
Lesson Layout:

Read the Purim story, discuss different ways to retell it. Do some online research for different Purim Spiels, music. 

Key Technologies:
Common Craft. Students could take their live presentation script or write one of their own. They could then collaborate to create their Common Craft pieces to retell the story in a way that the younger classes would enjoy. This is something that could then go into an area where teachers could just take it to present, or it could become part of an expanded Learning section of the temple web site.

Our 7th graders present a Purim play to the religious school each year. This will give them an opportunity to present the play in a lasting way. They could also use this same approach to create short plays for some of the younger classes.

Another fun approach for students might be to create a storyboard or comic strip version of the Purim story. That's even something they could put together and use as a donation to the temple library, or as a fundraiser, depending on how it's done.

Topic: Holocaust
Lesson Layout:

Flipped Classroom mode. We have an extensive Holocaust study packet. The problem is that we never make it through the whole thing because it's just too long.

It will take some commitment on the part of the students, their families, and the religious school to get students to read this material outside of class so that we can jump right into the discussion and project work.

Technologies:

An all-class collaborative timeline using Timetoast or similar online timeline creating program. I envision students each taking a different aspect/person/time period of the timeline, and adding in what they've learned from their reading. Also, if the families are amenable to it, students could add in family history, making this timeline unique. At the end of the project, we will have a lasting timeline that will become part of the temple archive.

I think this approach is useful because of the amount and type of information you can add to the timelines. It's also important for the students to see what else was going on in the world around them -- in the arts, sciences, sports, politics, etc. -- to gain a better understanding of how something like this could happen and go unnoticed or misunderstood for so long.

TTF: Big Ideas

I have to say that my head is still spinning with all the options I now see are available for me to use in the classroom. I am more inspired than intimidated. This has been a wonderful learning experience!

Technology in and of itself is not necessarily something that will benefit students in the classroom. However, after extensive exploration (and diving down numerous, fascinating rabbit holes), I can see ways to apply different technologies to various subject areas in the classroom.
   
I will be more likely to go to my extensive bank of online resources to look for more innovative ways to engage my students in the topic at hand. While Life Cycles are an important part of our religious school curriculum, the textbook we have is fine, but it doesn't grab the students' attention. The funny thing is, I think that if I took the activities in the textbook and converted them to some online format (blog, game, flash cards), the students would jump right into it and actually enjoy it more!
 
I hope to find the right match of technology to enhance my students' understanding of the topic material. There's so much available that I think it will wind up being fairly easy to find programs that are suitable matches for the tone of the lesson I want to present; the challenge, I think, will be winnowing down my choices. I look forward to checking in here for future input and inspiration!