Reflections About Myself and Class

When I first was approached by a past Cohort student (a friend of mine since grade school) about taking this class I was skeptical.  Technology was certainly not a strong point of mine.  I graduated in 1993 with my teaching degree when computers were just emerging into the classes. Only a handful of students had a computer in the dorm room and the majority of students used them (in the school computer lab) only to write up papers. I never really gave computers a chance other than sending off e-mails to parents, writing a paper on the computer or checking out my social media accounts (or my kids to monitor them). Besides, I had 5 jobs and 2 teens, so when was I ever going to find the time to go to class each month or to complete the classwork required of me?
 However, I thought about all I would be missing without this class.  The chance to connect with my students and show them that I, too, could be "hip" and get on the technology bandwagon.  I am the Learning Center specialist at 2 temples, so how could I say that I was helping every student that I saw when I  didn't have all of the resources needed to help them feel successful? The chance to connect students, parents and teachers together under one source was also appealing to me. 
So, here I am.  After asking myself one important question, "Why would I not?" Boy, am I glad that I stopped making excuses and decided to overcome my fear of technology.  I may not be one of the youngest teachers, but the analogy "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," is wrong.  I have learned a lot from this class.  I am so pumped to show my fellow colleagues, educational directors, parents and ALL of the students new ways to utilize learning and the web. I have learned to try new things and not be afraid to ask for help.  The support that I got in this class was phenomenal and readily available to anyone who took advantage of the help offered.  I look forward to teaching next year and showing off my new tech savvy self!

Celebrating our Multicultural Class at TCEE

This year our three-year-old class, the Dubim, is blessed with students from all over the world.  Taking full advantage of our parents and the internet, we decided to study a little bit about each of the cultures represented.  We started by identifying where each child is from using Google Maps and our classroom world map.

Maps

 

Check out our interactive map and classroom map:




View Dubim in a larger map

Questions

We asked the student what they wanted to learn about the different nations.  This student did not want to speak, so I typed her questions into the program for her.  Here are her questions:


Student Questions

Flags

We then looked up the flags.  Working as a group, we created flags from each nation and then worked on individual flags to display then take home.

USA and Belgium

     

Brazil

South Korea

Israel

We created a matching game with the flags.

Here the students are describing our wall of flags and how we made them.

Parent Participation

When the parents came in, they showed us pictures of houses, played games, sang songs, and read books in their native languages.  We played an origami based game for Japan, and ate waffles for Belgium.  (They were delicious!)  Here is the recipe for the waffles - in Metric, of course!

Ingredients:
250g ordinary flour, 250g castor sugar, 250g butter, 4 eggs, vanilla sugar or extract to taste

Preparation:
Mix the flour and sugar. Blend in melted butter and the 4 egg yolks. Mix well. Whip egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form peaks. Blend them into the mixture along with the vanilla. Important! Leave the dough to sit for at least three hours before cooking.

Then I heat my waffle iron to the max, to then reduce heat and start baking at a good speed. This means your first two waffles are always slightly burnt, but you are making a batch anyway so just throw those out :-) I always lightly brush the inside before baking the first waffle, but I don't repeat that afterwards. The trick is to not open the iron until you hear the sizzling stop, otherwise you will tear the waffles apart.

Languages

Children are always interested in birthdays.  One of the ways we looked at the various cultures was by watching a video of the song, "Happy Birthday" in Korean.  The children were delighted.







We learned to say "Hello" in all the languages represented in the classroom.  The children from the various countries helped us with the pronunciations.

Student Comments

Finally, some of the children commented on what they had learned.  They picked Avitars, backgrounds, and then recorded their comments.

Flipped Classroom

Students who get conventional education, with lessons in class and project work assigned for home, are getting shortchanged. Their education is not as complete as it could be.

In a flipped classroom model, students are more likely to get the whole picture.

The flipped classroom stands conventional education on its head. Instead of assigning students big projects to complete independently or even as teamwork outside of the classroom, the project work gets done at school and the lessons happen at home.

How does that work? Teachers put together their lessons in the form of podcasts or video. They post them online. The students then have the assignment of watching/listening to the lessons outside of class. Once they've had the virtual lesson, they come back to class with the background they need to begin the project work.

In class, the students get together in collaborative groups to work on their projects. The benefit of doing this in class over doing it at [someone's] home is that if they're in class, they have the teacher as a consultant as well as their classmates. When someone hits an "aha!" moment, they can share it with the rest of the group. Collaboration can inspire more creativity.

So, the key benefit to the flipped classroom, as we see it, is that students get the opportunity to more clearly demonstrate their understanding--or lack of understanding--with the teacher right there, ready to support them and help them out. If students get the "lesson" ahead of the activity, they should be more likely to come into class with questions, having had some time to reflect on the material (assuming they did it in a timely fashion).

Here's our PSA for the Flipped Classroom:

Project Based Learning

PBL, better known as Project Based Learning, is a creative way to include all students in our learning environment. Students have various needs and learning styles.  PBL allows for differentiation to include everyone, making them feel special and bringing out the best of each student. The multi disciplinary approach encourages collaboration, multi tasking, problem solving skills, utilizing the community and staff as mentors in the learning process. Creating a newspaper by  having a local printer come in and help them produce their work. This collaboration improves the quality of the final project. The learning becomes relevant and connects to real life issues that provide a wonderful community service, taking students to the next level.

To get started the kickoff event helps to generate questions from the students which inspires and directs them in their research. Creativity is used by students in their researching the project. Research is not limited to the computer or books but through keeping data on experiments they have created. They share their research for feedback from classmates and mentors to improve the quality of their project. Each student works on their strengths to the best of their abilities collaborating together to support their challenges.

Final presentations are made to a broad audience including parents, general public, specialists, faculty, and the remainder of the school community. PBL is a very effective educational model for all types of students.

For more information go to Edutopia.org http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-maine-project-based-learning-six-steps-planning

http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-student-motivation

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/project-based-learning-getting-started-basics-andrew-miller

CRCD Framework

Understanding CRCD Framework for Education

What is CRCD?

Why Use This Approach?

Using this approach students can work collaboratively and creatively to learn about and teach others a variety of topics. This allows students to use their strengths and really shine using as much or as little technology as they want.

For more information:
EdTech
Leonardo's Laptop

4th Grade Aliyah Video Project

My 4th grade classes are really really different. In one class, I have a group who feel much more traditionally spiritually connected (most believe in a more traditional concept of G-d, they really enjoy and buy into more traditional prayer) my other class has a more diverse range of opinions on both G-d and Jewish practice. Our core curriculum focus this year is "What does it mean to be a part of the Jewish people?" for both groups this is a tough question, especially when thinking about Israel, a country that most of them have never been to but have learned so much about.

In our Israel curriculum this year, we are focused on some of the recent Aliyot to Israel: Yemenite Aliyah, Ethiopian Aliyah and Aliyah from the former Soviet Union. However, the idea of moving to Israel, Lashanah habaah is still really foreign to all my kids. Yes, they have heard of the Holocaust, but most of them have been lucky (depending on how you look at it) to grow up in the Boston area never having heard, seen or felt antisemitism.

In planning how I wanted to teach this, I sat down with one of my coworkers to brainstorm our goals.

• Students are able to empathize with those who faced antisemitism and oppression
• Students understand although they do not need to agree, with the Jewish concept of Lashanah Habaah
• Students are engaged and excited to learn about the process of making Aliyah from each country
• Students work with two or three other students and work well as a group
• Students are able to creatively present their findings in a 3-10 min video clip
• Students have a better understanding about the need for a Jewish state

To do this, we decided to break our three classes of 4th graders into nine small groups and assign them to topics as follows:

4B will focus on the culture of each country (Yemen, Ethiopia, former S.U.); what Jewish practices were like there, etc 

4C will focus on the reasons that the Jews left that country; oppression, isolation, general conditions

4A will focus on the Journey itself, what did it take for them to make it to Israel, how did they get there? Who helped, etc

In making movie trailers for this project, it was helpful to suss out each student's current tech abilities and resources in addition to other talents so that making the groups can be as successful as possible. Students will be able to play around with animation, documentary style productions and pretty much anything else that they can come up with that still will convey the process of Aliyah in a respectful way.

Tech Fellowship furthering intentionality in the classroom

The past two months, in this technology fellowship, I have really thought about what technology I use to further my own learning and in general in my own life. While it is really important to me to bring fun and engaging new technologies into my classrooms, I also want to make sure that my time and focus is still on the materials and that my students grasp Jewish concepts rather than just tech concepts. This tech fellowship has been really helpful in structuring my thoughts and experimentation with what can be helpful and what is just adding in tech for the sake of adding tech. Learning how other teachers are using technology and accessing teacher connection/resource pages has been the most useful to me. For example, I think that using a wiki as a way to organize events for high school students could be a less chaotic way to plan. I also want to continue to explore all the online recording and movie programs.