Tech Rav

My First Online Course

2012-02-23T00:19:00.003-05:00

In a few weeks, G-d willing, I hope to be teaching my first online course through MOFET International. The topic of the course is Using Web 2.0 Tools to Transform Teaching and Learning and you can register by using the following LINK. It is hard to believe that in my 15 years of teaching and 10+ years integrating technology into my classes that I have never before given an online course before. I have taught many blended learning courses using The Frisch School Wiki together with face-to-face instruction. I also currently help facilitate a number of Frisch students who are taking their own online foreign language courses using the K12 platform thanks to a generous grant by the Jewish Education Project and the Avi Chai Foundation to support Digital Learning. However, this is my first foray into the world of asynchronous online learning courses.

The big question that I am struggling with is how do I achieve the sense of belonging and connectedness, the sense of "being" in the course, in an online learning environment. This is easy when everyone meets together in a classroom and I have the chance to also share long conversations with my students outside of class but how does one do this without the common physical learning space and ability to talk directly with each other?

I know that such a connection is possible for I have experienced it myself as a student. I remember the first online course that I ever took. It was a technology certificate course on the topic "New Technologies for Jewish Learning" given some ten years ago through a now defunct Jewish professional development organization called JSkyway. I remember the course well not necessarily for the information that I learned but for the close connection that I developed with my instructor, Dr. Shmuli Spero OBM, a pioneer in the area of technology integration in Jewish education. Dr. Spero sent us ecards to welcome us to the course and constant reminders to keep us focused and on task. His personality was infectious and clearly came across even in this virtual world.

This course opened up a connection to Shmuli that I was able to continue in the years that followed. Dr. Spero became a personal mentor as I took a more active leadership role in educational technology. When I went to Cleveland to conduct my first professional development seminar in the Fuchs Mizrachi School on the topic of Gemara Berura, I finally got to meet Shmuli in person. He sat in on all my sessions and stayed up with me until late at night to give me valuable feedback and constructive critiques between my first and second days of training sessions.

A few years later, I took a hybrid or blended learning course with Shmuli in the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education. The online course was actually on the topic of creating online courses using YU's Angel Course Management System. Shmuli still lived in Cleveland so most of the course was conducted online as he led us through the steps of creating our own online courses. However, Shmuli did come into New York a few times during the semester to teach us in person.

The most notable line from Shmuli in this course that I still use today is how he described the value of the online course management system. "What do you give to the person who has everything?" Shmuli bellowed. "You give him a box to put it in. The Angel Course Management System is that box." I still use a variation of this line to describe the value of the shared online collaborative learning environment that we have helped to build on The Frisch School Wiki. It is the "box" to put all of our learning topics from various subjects in, thus breaking down the walls of the classroom by creating this common learning space.

Years passed and gradually I lost touch with my mentor Dr. Shmuli Spero. Then two years ago, sadly and ironically, I learned of his untimely death to cancer through a video on the front page of the online edition of the New York Times. The video entitled A Patient, a Pioneer was about new experimental cancer treatments. From the first moment that I heard Shmuli's voice in the video, I knew it was him. The video ended on sad note, saying that Shmuli's cancer had recurred. After watching, I Googled Shmuli and I learned online that my mentor, who taught me my first online course, had passed away.

I know that I have digressed in this blog posting. But contemplating teaching my first online course in technology integration, I cannot help but think fondly of my teacher and mentor who opened me up to the world of online learning. Dr. Spero was the rare person who was able to show his great affect and personal connection even through the impersonal medium of online distance learning. I only hope that through his shining example I can be successful as well. May Shmuli Spero's name be remembered for a blessing.

Why Technology Will Not Save Money In Education

2012-02-19T23:40:00.006-05:00

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times has been making the rounds of Jewish educational "cyberspace", Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?. The main thesis of this piece is that the hype by government spokespeople and Apple about digital textbooks and the like is much more about selling iPads and other Apple products than it is about sound education.

One of the most often repeated claims about the benefits of educational technology that this article challenges is the premise that integrating technology in education will achieve a substantial cost savings. The key quote (I believe) is by Thomas Reeves, an educational technology expert at University of Georgia:

There are two big lies the educational technology industry tells... One, you can replace the teacher. Two, you'll save money in the process. Neither is borne out.

This issue is especially poignant in the field of Jewish education where technology integration is often viewed as the solution for the tuition crisis. My friend, Rabbi Aaron Ross in an excellent recent blog posting calls into question this assertion. I will elaborate on one area addressed in the Los Angeles Times article and touched upon by Rabbi Ross that has been of tremendous recent interest to me, the iPad and digital textbooks.

As I have written, digital textbooks on the iPad or other similar e-readers can be a great boon for education in that they can contain much richer interactive content than any traditional textbook. (Although this is not yet the case as Jeffrey Thomas points out in his scathing critique of the first generation of digital textbooks using the iBooks platform.) They can also solve the age old problem of portability with children transporting back and forth from school to home one 1.3 pound device instead of a knapsack full of books weighing dozens of pounds. However, after some simple analysis, I do NOT believe using the iPad for digital textbooks will achieve any cost savings. Rather, it will raise the textbook cost by upwards of $500 per student.

Let me explain. The iPad costs approximately $500 and textbooks from iBooks are currently priced at $14.99 each. Let's assume for this projection that Apple will lower it's textbook price at some point in the near future to $10 each. I think it is fair to assume that Apple will NEVER charge less than $10 for a digital textbook and that the iPad will NEVER be cheaper than $500 considering how Apple has succeeded in keeping it's prices standard over the years.

Now, the average paper high school textbook costs $80. Some cost a little less, many cost more but that is the average. It sounds like the iBooks would be a great deal at $15. But here is the catch. The iBook is sold to the STUDENT while paper textbooks are purchased by the SCHOOL and lent to the student for the duration of the school year. What this means is that a school will have to pay $10 every single year to supply students with digital textbooks for the iPad. This is in addition to the $500 cost for the iPad.

Now let's do the math. If the average paper textbook lasts 8 years, in reality many textbooks are used for twice that time, then within eight years the cost of the iBook is the same as the cost of the paper textbook NOT INCLUDING the $500 for the iPad. In reality, the digital textbooks then become at least $500 more per student for his/her four years in high school than the paper ones. That is a substantial sum of money.

Now you might argue that replacing digital textbooks each year allows a school to always stay current and you would be right. It is pathetic when a student is studying from a history textbook that is 15 years old in which Bill Clinton is still the president. However, in science this time span is less significant and in math it is certainly possible that the 15 year old book is a much better textbook since nothing substantial has changed in high school mathematics in the last 15 years.

Anyways, your argument would be besides the point since my assertion is not that paper textbooks are necessarily better. There are many reasons why the digital books could be vastly superior as stated earlier. My argument is that digital textbooks, as with most educational technologies, are not cheaper. The only way to save money utilizing technology in education is to fire teachers, as Aaron Ross points out in his posting, and a world where our teachers start being replaced by computers is a very scary slippery slope which I am not ready to climb.

Mind you, I am very excited about the potential for iPads to transform education. The fact that iPads are on in less than 15 seconds as opposed to the average laptop that can take 2-5 minutes for start up and log on is a VAST improvement in the classroom where students often learn in 40 minute periods. The ability using iPads to take pictures and video, edit that multi-media content and combine it with text and other web-based resources, and present the finished product is much more than any laptop can do and the easy portability of iPads is a great asset as well. Even the promise of digital textbooks with interactive content is something I am greatly looking forward to.

However, I get very scared when the focus of technology becomes about the device and how it will save us money whether it be iPads, Smart Boards, digital textbooks, or online learning. Educational technology as with all educational innovations can never focus on the device. It has to focus on meeting our curricular and educational goals. Sometimes technology can better achieve these goals, other times it cannot. But don't be fooled by the salesperson or government spokesperson who says that iPads (SmartBoards, online learning, or any other tech flavor of the month) are the panacea for education or the solution to the tuition crisis. It's not about the gadget, it's how we use it.

Why I love Teaching, Technology, and Social Media: A Tu B'shvat Story

2012-02-08T15:08:00.000-05:00

There is a famous story about Choni Hamagel which I have taught many times in honor of Tu Bishvat from the Talmud in Taanit 23a. Here is a very short summary of the story. Choni draws a circle and demands that G-d bring rain which G-d finally does. Then Choni sees a person planting a carob tree which will only bear fruit after 70 years. Choni questions the wisdom of such a long term proposition and the person responds that since his grandparents planted a carob tree for him, he will plant one for his grandchildren. Choni then falls asleep for 70 years, perhaps the source for the story of Rip Van Winkle, and then wakes up to find the carob tree fully grown. The story ends on a depressing note with Choni so distressed that he is living in a world without any of his former friends and family that he exclaims או חברותא או מיתותא, loosely translated as "Give me a chavruta, a partner, or give me death". For a very clever video rendition of this story minus the "sad" ending, you can watch a wonderful cartoon version created by G-dcast here.

Last night, in honor of Tu Bishvat, I decided to tweet a student project on this story that was created way back in 2001 as a part of a class How to learn Gemara website. One of the wonders of digital learning, a term which I believe had not even been coined when I created this project with my class, is that one creates an online portfolio that can be accessed for many years to come. Even after Yahoo's Geocities which hosted our website went defunct, a new free service Geocities.ws generously took over free hosting of our site. You can read more about this project in a previous blog post here.

So I tweeted about this wonderful project created by my students from way back in the day and within a few moments I get a reply on Twitter, "I was one those students!" from @alicht, a student who I have seen in person on only a few occasions in the last 5 years. Obviously, I was beaming, smiling ear to ear, as I interacted with my former student from so many years ago on Twitter.You can view the Twitter exchange below.

This vignette illustrates why I love teaching, technology, and social media. As teachers, we are all planting trees like in the Choni story. Sometimes, these trees can bear almost instant fruit. Other times it is a much longer and more arduous process in which we wonder if any our seeds will ever sprout. But after a few years, you never know what wonderful fruits our trees will grow. However, at times, we don't know about these momentous occasions. How many of us have the chance to meet our students years later and reflect about what effect we might have had on their lives? This is where technology and social media can be so awesome. Through technology, we can create a snapshot of our student's performance, an online portfolio for us teachers and our students to look back on for years to come. And through social media, we can continue to interact with our students as they grow into adults who themselves are influential members of our Jewish community. We don't need a 70 year slumber to wake up to our fruit trees. Through the power of social media we can continue to interact, influence, and "shep good old fashioned naches" at the fruits of our labor.

Happy Tu Bishvat to all!

What do our students think of Digital Learning?

2012-02-01T22:35:00.001-05:00

The following posting is cross-posted from The Frisch School Blog. Enjoy!

Today is Digital Learning Day, a day devoted to reflection on innovative ways to reach our students using various technologies. As a part of this day, I went around the school taking pictures of various examples of digital learning that occur on a typical day at The Frisch School and I was blown away by the depth of the the technology-assisted learning that took place throughout the school, in the library, computer room, hallways, cafeteria, and classroom.

On the Frisch Wiki, Mrs. Tikvah Wiener, our English Department Chair and Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies, asked our students to reflect about how technology enhances or detracts from learning. Here are some responses.

One of the best responses:
"Technology offers significant advantages on two opposite ends of the learning process: learning the facts and seeing the bigger picture. The speed of computer processing and efficiency of the internet expedite the process of learning the basic information. The widespread use of Google, Wikipedia, and other search engines for educational purposes exemplifies this point. One area that I find is particularly aided by the brilliance of the search engine is in-depth research. When I began my research for the upcoming Model United Nations conference, the first thing I did was Google my country and my two topics. Instantly, I had access to previous United Nations resolutions, international law journals, statistics, and other useful resources that would take hours and hours to sift through without the help of Google.

Technology also enhances the culmination of the learning process: taking a step back from the information and placing it in a broader context. Forums and discussion pages (such as the wiki page we are now posting on) offer a unique opportunity for students to the see multiple perspectives on a single issue, a process and educational methodology known as divergent thinking. From personal observations on the Frisch wiki, I have gleaned that discussion through technology is often more effective than classroom discussion because communication through technology requires students to think more carefully before presenting their points of view. Thus, the responses of students tend to be more cohesive and eloquent. Additionally, the enticing nature of technology often provides respite from the normal classroom environment, pushing many students to become more involved in the discussion than they would be in a classroom.

Despite some irreplaceable aspects of the classroom setting, technology has the potential to enhance and expedite the learning process. The internet gives us the world at our fingertips, and the lightning-fast computer processors make obtaining information significantly easier to do than it was even ten years ago. To all those who point out the flaws in educational technology, I answer that this is only the beginning. The technology industry is all about innovation and development, so it is constantly evolving to take on new challenges. As more and more students pass through school systems enhanced by technology, analysts are gathering data to determine which methods do and do not work. The next step is taking the data and putting it to use to improve on existing technologies and create new ones."

Excerpts:
"Responsibility extends beyond marking a line between educational purpose and “distractive” purpose. Kohelet teaches that knowledge in excess hurts more than it helps. One must consider the words of Kohelet 1:18 to perceive the truth of the assertion that excessive knowledge has a marked downside: “for in much wisdom is much vexation; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” One must draw a line between areas in which technology can truly aid in the learning process and areas in which technology can only detract from the learning process. Technology grants vast resources of knowledge, but certain areas of study—certain pursuits—must be marked as “vexing,” or in certain cases, outright unacceptable."

"Technology has become a resourceful tool that adds to student learning. With the help of technology one can instantly look up information to add to class discussions and watch videos to enhance the classroom experience. In addition, learning does not stop after class anymore; students are able to utilize websites (like our wiki pages) to have online discussions about topics learned during their school day. Students do not have to worry about having bad hand-writing because now with technology they are able to type up their notes and assignments. I can only imagine how technology will enhance our learning in years to come."

"Technology enhances learning. One example of technology's usefulness is for vocabulary. Instead of having a vocabulary quiz, in my English class, we sometimes have a picture slideshow project. We make slideshows with pictures that explain a word's meaning. After the project is done, we put it online and have an enjoyable and useful study aid. Another example of how technology enhances learning is the SmartBoard. For example, in Biology, Dr. Furman often puts a slideshow on the SmartBoard which depicts an experiment that a given scientist has done. . . Although cell phones are not allowed in my classes, some schools use a new program in which students can answer a question by texting to certain number. Overall, if technology is used in the correct way, it can create a better and more fun learning environment for students."

"The advanced technology today is great for doing research. With just one click on Google, a student has access to just about any information he/she could possibly need. I have used Google every day for research for projects and help with homework, and I use Gmail to email teachers or talk to peers. Other websites such as Facebook and Youtube have their advantages as well. Facebook can be used to talk to students about homework or other school-related topics. A perfect example of Facebook's helping with school-related activities happened during Shiriyah. Rabbi Pittinsky made Twitter and Facebook groups for each grade, so all the students in each grade knew what was going on with their teams."

"I dislike the accessibility of information. I believe it is making students lazy. For example, I can easily find the definition of any word without looking it up manually in the dictionary. This ease is a cause for laziness. Another example of technology's drawbacks is in the writing of research papers. One can easily find an outline of his topic online and copy it. In the past, it was much harder to find pre-made outlines and research papers. When I have a large research paper to do, I often find myself putting off beginning because I know I can easily Google my topic and find what I need, instantaneously. If I had to go to a library to do my work, I would realize how long that would take and get started immediately.... However, I am sure technology will only become more established in education and will be greatly beneficial in certain areas."

Below are slideshows of only a few of the various digital learning activities at Frisch today. Enjoy!

What are you planning for Digital Learning Day tomorrow?

2012-01-31T17:07:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is Digital Learning Day, a day devoted to reflection on best practices for utilizing educational technology to enhance teaching and learning. You might be wondering what is the big deal about this day since for many of you already every day is a digital learning day with the use of the Smart Boards for interactive lessons, Wikis and Blogs for communication and collaboration, and integration of many other computer applications and web-based tools for helping our students attain mastery in various subjects. However, it is always important to continue to add to your teaching repertoire and technology can be a great tool to do this so I highly recommend that you take tomorrow as an opportunity for continued growth.

Here are a few suggestions:
1. Attend a webinar:

Webinars are free and easy opportunities for professional development embedded directly into your school day.
The following webinar by the YU School Partnership is being given by Dr. Eliezer Jones, YU School Partnership's Educational Technology Specialist along with Esther Feldman, The Lookstein Center for Jewish education's Director of Information Technology and Financial Services and Smadar Goldstein, Founder and Director of JETS - Jerusalem EdTech Solutions which we used to conduct a webinar about Ethiopian Jewry with our entire 10th grade as a part of their Frisch Africa Connection. It is taking place tomorrow from 12-1PM. Here is the link: http://www.yuschoolpartnership.org/webinars/upcoming-webinars?task=3&cid=28&sem_midx=1&sem_jidx=0

2. Read an article:

I wrote an article last year on utilizing technology in Judaic Studies for Jewish Action. It might offer a good introduction to this topic. You can read the article here: Technology in the Classroom

3.Conduct a classroom poll.

Polleverywhere is a great tool to get instant feedback from all of your students using texting on their cell phones what is called BYOD, Bring Your Own Device.
I have blogged in the past about using PollEverywhere as a classroom exit ticket here.

4. Utilize your Smart Board as a truly interactive tool:

Smart Boards have become ubiquitous and virtually all of us use them on a regular basis but do we really utilize it's capabilities to promote student interaction or is it just a glorified white board. One easy way to make our lessons more interactive is by using the Smart Notebook Lesson Activity tool kit which is installed on EVERY computer at Frisch.
Here are simple step-by-step instructions: http://downloads01.smarttech.com/media/services/quickreferences/pdf/english/lat_qrg.pdf

5. "Flip" your classroom:

Many teachers have already started to "flip" their lessons by assigning videos from Khan Academy or videos they created themselves for students to watch for homework. I have blogged in the past about the pros and cons of this approach here, here, and here.
Here is a link to http://www.khanacademy.org/ and Screen-Cast-O-Matic an easy tool to record your own "flipped classroom" videos.

6. Assign your students a Voicethread:

Many Judaic Studies teachers have also used Voicethread as an easy tool for assigning audio assignments in which every student reads or discusses a text for you to watch later.
I have blogged about this in the past here.
I also recommend this article by Rabbi Aaron Ross entitled The Wonder of Voicethread.
You can access Voicethread here: http://voicethread.com/

7. Use Glogster or Prezi for your next student project:

Glogster is an online multi-media replacement for the traditional poster board. You can find it here: http://www.glogster.com/
Prezi is a free online presentation tool that allows you to focus on both the "big pictures" and the "nitty gritty details" of a topic in ways not easily replicated using the traditional PowerPoint presentation. Here is a link: http://prezi.com/

8. Try something completely new!

If you want more ideas, here are 2 Google Docs full of dozens of free web-based technology tools to use with your students.
Useful tools for Jewish Educators and Teacher Trainers
24+ Jewish EdTech Ideas

Please share your ideas for Digital Learning Day in the comments to this blog. I would love to continue this digital conversation!

My response to Thought Questions vs. "Spit Back"

2012-01-24T12:24:00.001-05:00

Rabbi Yaki Blau, a colleague of mine at The Frisch School has raised an interesting discussion on Lookjed about Thought questions vs. "spit back". You can read his query/comments and the ensuing discussion here. Rabbi Blau recommends exclusively using "spit back" questions on formal tests for various reasons. I just wrote a response that I am including in this blog for the benefit of my readers since it touches on an important educational topic that has some applications to technology that I discuss below. I would also recommend my posting on IBM's computer Watson, What Watson Can Teach Us, which touches on the broader issue of the place of knowledge vs. skills in this new age of computer databases, Watson, and Google.

Dear Shalom and List:
Regarding the query by my colleague at The Frisch School, Rabbi Yaakov Blau on Thought questions vs "spit back", I believe that the best answer, as is often the case, is there is a place for both of these types of questions on well written assessments.

My philosophy towards testing is greatly influenced by a seminal class that I took a number of years ago with Dr. Scott Goldberg in the Azrieli Graduate School for Jewish Education and Administration. We used the textbook, Classroom Assessment: Principles and Practice for Effective Standards-Based Instruction by JH McMillan which I would highly recommend. In the course, Dr. Goldberg advised that the teacher first identify Learning Targets for their course and then make sure that all assessments address at least some of these goals. This is similar to the Understanding By Design approach where you "Begin With the End in Mind", as Stephen Covey would say, or put another way, סוף מעשה במחשבה תחילה, as we describe the Shabbat in לכה דודי. The learning targets should include the areas of Knowledge and Simple Understanding, Deep Understanding and Reasoning, Skills, Products, and Affective Targets.

Obviously some of these targets would require "spit back" types of questions while others would call for more "thought" based questions. Even in reference to "spit back" questions, it is important to recognize that there are different types of "spit back". One can ask questions for simple knowledge like basic translation and information and one can ask more sophisticated deeper understanding "spit back" that requires the learner to follow the various stages in a logical progression like the back and forth arguments in a long Tosfot. This is the type of high-level "spit back" that I believe Rabbi Blau recommends for formal exams. However, if one's targets include skills like using keywords to read a Talmudic sugya or applying knowledge to new situations then "thought" type questions are also warranted whether in a formal test or using alternative forms of assessments as Rabbi Aaron Ross advocated.

Technology can greatly assist in constructing these alternative skills-based assessments for Talmud. For example, students can indicate their mastery of the Shakla Vetarya of a sugya by breaking down the stages of the Gemara and classifying them using a computer program like Gemara Berura. They can also read the sugya for the teacher to listen to later using Voicethread, a web-based app that allows students to record their voices using a computer's microphone . This is much more practical than the oral testing that Rabbi Blau advances but points out cannot easily be done in a Yeshiva Day School schedule. Since the teacher can listen to the Voicethreads at his/her leisure, these types of assignments can be assigned regularly. They can also include any Hebrew text including Talmud, Tanach, Rishonim, or Acharonim so they can be easly adapted for many levels of learners.

At the same time, when I have taught Gemara in the past, I also included skills-based "thought" questions on my formal tests as well by giving my students "unseen" Gemara texts containing the same keyword structures studied in class. My students were naturally worried about these "unseen" texts but soon realized that they were eminently doable since I only asked them to replicate exactly the skill learned in class; to use the keywords to explain what a new Gemara is doing in terms of unlocking the Shakla Vetarya, the back and forth of the debate, rather than decipher what an unfamiliar Gemara is saying in terms of the content of the "unseen" Gemara. This is an important skill for students to master so they can learn to "make a laining" on a new Gemara as we would say in Yeshiva, to gain the ability to independently read an unfamiliar Gemara. Since this is an important learning target, naturally I included this on my exams. I also included application questions on my tests as well, although I usually limited them to one or two questions at the end for many of the same reasons Rabbi Blau mentioned.

The bottom line is that one should test to the learning targets that one teaches. Therefore, I believe that a good assessment should include simple knowledge and deeper understanding "spit back" questions, skills based questions, and some application type questions as well. If a test is balanced and closely aligned to the clearly communicated learning targets then students will adapt to them and use these assessments to show their knowledge and grow in their understanding.

I welcome continued feedback on this most fruitful discussion.
Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky
Director of Educational Technology
The Frisch School

Digital Textbooks in Jewish Day Schools: Is the future now?

2012-01-21T18:24:00.003-05:00

I just posted the following question to Lookjed, the Jewish Educators listserv sponsored by the Lookstein Center. You can follow the Lookjed discussion online here. I will share feedback from the List as I receive it. I welcome feedback from my blog readers as well. Please share your experiences in the comments to this posting.

Dear Shalom and List:
With the recent announcement by Apple about their K-12 textbook publishing partnerships and new software for creating and customizing textbooks for the iPad (http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks), I was wondering whether anyone could share their experiences using digital textbooks in Jewish Day Schools. I know that there have been similar discussions on the list in the past here and here but it might be worth revisiting since technology keeps advancing at such a steady pace.

The way I see it there are 3 advantages to using digital textbooks on iPads or other e-readers.

1. Convenience: Having one small tablet to carry back and forth from school is much easier and healthier for our students than lugging large backpacks full of books. The present situation forces many students to leave their textbooks in school or at home rather than transport them back and forth or to own 2 copies of their books which is obviously not the ideal.

2. Multi-media content: Digital textbooks can offer much more than the traditional text and pictures. They can include audio, video, animations, and interactive content that can greatly enhance the educational experience.

3. Cost savings (maybe): Digital textbooks might be cheaper than purchasing all those traditional books although, since paper books can be reused for many years, the veracity of any promised cost savings has to be carefully examined.

The drawbacks of digital textbooks are also many. Ipads or similar e-readers can be lost, broken, or stolen; content needs to be created for Judaic subjects as well as General Studies; they cannot be used on Shabbat or Yom Tov; and there is a large cost for purchasing iPads or similar e-readers for every student and creating/replacing current textbooks.

My question to the List is does anyone have experience implementing digital textbooks in Jewish Day Schools for General or Judaic Studies and/or does anyone have any plans to pilot such an implementation in the near future?

I welcome the feedback from the collected wisdom of the various educators on this list.
Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky
Director of Educational Technology
The Frisch School

#FrischShiriyah takes over Facebook (and Twitter too)!!!

2012-01-11T20:07:00.000-05:00

The following is cross-posted on The Frisch School Blog.

It is always so exciting to watch our students using all of their talents for Shiriyah. This year we have added additional aspects to the Shiriyah experience utilizing the world of social media with which our kids are so familiar. We do this with the philosophy that Shiriyah can be an opportunity to model for our students the great power of social media as a tool for constructive sharing, what noted technology thinker Clay Shirky calls Cognitive Surplus.

With that in mind, you might have noticed our ubiquitous presence on our Frisch School Twitter feed sending updates about the various events of this exciting week with the "hashtag" #FrischShiriyah. We have also launched for the first time our Frisch School Facebook Page so we can post even more rich and interactive content about Shiriyah including videos and photos. You can access this page by going to the following direct link: https://www.facebook.com/FrischSchool. While you're on our page, make sure to "Like Us" so you can see our updates during Shiriyah and throughout the school year on your Facebook News Feed (screenshot below).

However, this is only a part of our use of Facebook and Twitter for Shiriyah. We have provided our students the opportunity to use it as well. We have done this by creating Facebook Groups for each grade. These groups are closed to the world at large but open to our students and faculty. This was an experiment, we really did not know what to expect, while we closely monitored this undertaking. I am happy to report that so far our experiment has been a resounding success. The grades have really come together harnessing the power of this new medium to brainstorm, organize, and create.

Each grade has used their groups to post a laundry list of everything needed for the Hallways, Stomp, Project Runway, Cake Boss, and the list goes on and on. They have also found more creative ways to use this online medium. Here are a few specific examples.

The Freshmen posted YouTube videos of each of their songs for Shiriyah night for everyone to watch and practice at home.
The Sophomores have posted photo albums of "The Midbar Experience".
The Juniors have posted pictures of various odds and ends that they had around the house (including wood and old dressers) to use for the hallways.
The Seniors have been posting to their "Chevra" constant words of encouragement about the stomp, choir/medley, banner, video, and mural.

I wish I could show you the tremendous work and creativity that I am seeing online till late at night, the virtual Shiriyah after the physical building has already been closed for the evening, but these groups are only open to our students (with close monitoring by the faculty) so they can feel comfortable interacting informally with their classmates to help make such a massive undertaking into a reality.

The grades have also utilized public twitter feeds to broadcast to the world their enthusiasm and excitement about Shiriyah. You can view them using the following links: twitter.com/shiriyah9, twitter.com/shiriyah10, twitter.com/shiriyah11, twitter.com/shiriyah12.

Finally, we are excited to announce that this year for the first time we will be live streaming Shiriyah night for friends relatives, and alumni who cannot make it to the Frisch gym but would like to share in the Shiriyah experience. All you will need to do is go to our homepage, http://frisch.org/ and the video should be streaming directly from the website starting at 7:30PM. We are looking forward to seeing all of you Shiriyah night either physically in our gym to cheer on our talented and hardworking students or virtually through Frisch.org.

Kol Tuv,

Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky
Director of Educational Technology
The Frisch School

Using Poll Everywhere as your Exit Ticket

2011-11-20T00:05:00.001-05:00

As I have mentioned in the past, Poll Everywhere has always been a great classroom motivator since it allows teachers to elicit 100% student response using something students love, their cell phones. But is it just shtick or a genuine educational tool? I have had this debate with a respected colleague of mine who has argued that Poll Everywhere, while a nice tool, is really just "smoke and mirrors" and not real education, since one could get the same type of student response by requiring every kid to write down an answer to your question on a piece of paper and collecting them like Nechama Leibowitz used to do in her classes.

Recently, I have been experimenting with a new application of this tool which I believe is genuine since it cannot easily be replicated ANY OTHER WAY. I have been using Poll Everywhere for Exit Tickets. An exit ticket is a brief assessment that every student has to fill out before leaving class to indicate their understanding of the lesson. You can read a nice description of Exit Tickets here.

I started to utilize Exit Tickets in my lessons after discovering on a recent exam that students did much better on the translations and multiple choice which required simple understanding than they did on the essays in which a deeper understanding of the lesson was necessary. As a response to this, I needed a method of assuring that every student understood the "big idea" of each lesson on a daily basis. Enter the Exit Ticket.

However, the problem with Exit Tickets is that to be most effective, the teacher must give immediate feedback so students know they properly understood the material. When using the pen and paper approach, this would require a lot of grading on a daily basis and students still might not see a model of the correct answer. This is where Poll Everywhere can be such an effective tool. When students fill out their Exit Tickets using texting on their cell phone via Poll Everywhere, there are no papers to grade and students immediately see the answers projected on the board. The teacher can then point out which answers are correct and even bring up the poll again at the beginning of the following lesson as a review of the previous day's material.

So far, I am using Poll Everywhere to create very simple Exit Tickets. At the end of each classroom period, I ask the students the same question, "What was the big idea of today's lesson?". You can see one example of such a poll below. I welcome other more creative questions for Exit Tickets using Poll Everywhere. Please add your own through the comments section below.

Technology in the Classroom: How is it going?

2011-11-15T20:52:00.000-05:00

Below is my recent posting for Lookjed, the Jewish Educational Listserv published by the Lookstein Center on the thread, Technology in the Classroom: How Is It Going?. Specifically, it is a response to this posting to this thread by my esteemed colleague, Rabbi Yaki Blau which expressed skepticism to the integration of technology into Jewish education. I welcome your feedback in the comments section.

Dear Shalom and List:

In reference to the recent posting by Rabbi Yaki Blau expressing skepticism about the benefits of technology in education, I find it ironic that once again I am debating with my respected colleague at The Frisch School on an online forum hosted in Israel some 6000 miles away from Paramus, NJ, when I could be discussing this with him directly in the teacher's room (as I often do). But that's the point. The Lookjed Listserv has provided us with a forum to debate ideas in a much more nuanced and thoughtful way (and with a MUCH larger audience) then we could ever experience in face-to-face conversation. This is one of the greatest advantages of technology and one that it behooves us to utilize in our classrooms. Technology has become the ideal platform for communication and collaboration.

Here are just a few examples of this from my own school (which Yaki is intimately familiar with).

1) We now have school-wide and grade-wide wikis for teachers and students to collaboratively integrate ideas from various subject areas focused around a common theme. In addition to their use for student-led asynchronous online discussion forums very similar to this Listserv, they have become the platform for many other creative activities. For example, we now run Integrated Educational Days where all of the lessons in a particular grade are focused around a common theme. We have a day for our Freshmen devoted to the subject of Fate and Free Will, for Sophomores devoted to the Power of the Book, and for Juniors devoted to the Holocaust. At the end of the day as a summative assessment, students are asked to work with a partner making a presentation using PowerPoint, Prezi, or Google Docs about the various classes they studied. The wiki is the common learning space where information from these lessons and additional resources are shared by the teachers and where the students final projects are posted as well. Without this online component, such a high level of collaboration between our teachers and students would not be possible. In addition, since this common learning space exists completely on the web, physical distance is no longer an impediment to such intense collaboration which leads to my second example.

2) We have created partnerships with a number of different schools in Israel for our online projects. Through the help of our local Jewish Federation, we have a 9th grade and 11th grade partnership with schools in Nahariya. This past year, we even planned and ran our 11th Grade Holocaust Integration together with one of these schools. We "met" with the teachers using Skype, our teachers both in Israel and New Jersey posted curricular materials on the wiki, and we had a follow-up Skype "face-to-face" conversation between one of our classes in Frisch and one in Nahariya reflecting on what was learned during this educational day. We also have a 10th grade partnership in our English classes with Neveh Channah in Kfar Etzion with the help of my esteemed colleague and fellow educational technologist Reuven Werber. These partnerships go beyond the "pen pals" of yesteryear to full fledged learning projects which are only possible through platforms like wikis and video conferencing.

3) We have also been experimenting with the flipped classroom model where teachers post short lectures online that students can access at home prior to getting into a deeper discussion in class. I have utilized this in my Nach classes to post basic word by word translation of the verses online so that in class we can almost immediately jump to the next level of higher analysis. One might argue that our students would do better reading the chapter in advance of class the old fashioned way but in most cases our students would merely do a superficial reading of an English translation when given such an assignment. When they watch the class on YouTube, they can see and hear a model of an accurate reading of the verses with key words circled or underlined and the ability to rewind if they miss a point. You can view my Youtube Flipped Classroom channel here: http://www.youtube.com/pittinsky. Similarly, a number of teachers now give students assignments to read the pesukim or Talmudic text to the teacher at home on their computer using a website called Voicethread. In each of these examples, technology is being utilized as a communication platform for students to work on reading skills an area that is sorely needed based on observations made in many of Lookjed discussions.

These are just a few examples of educational technology utilized as the ideal platform for communication and collaboration. Two other examples which I don't feel that I have the time to flesh out now are Google Docs as a platform for class-wide collaboration and real time student response systems like www.polleverywhere.com to simultaneously engage all students in a class discussion. To be continued...

In conclusion, I do not deny Yaki's premise that certain uses of technology can and in many times have made us into more superficial readers and thinkers. I recommend that he (and the list) read the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr which strongly asserts this very point. (You can read my review here.) One should certainly address these points directly with teachers and students and design research and classroom activities forcing students to go beyond the superficial level of thought that has become so easy with the rise of Google. My point is that one not throw out all the tremendous progress that technology is already achieving to enrich our educational lives because of one's fear of it's abuses.

Remember, every new technology in the past has had it's drawbacks as well as benefits. Just think back to the dramatic changes in the nature of Torah learning that took place as a result of the transition from a truly oral law to the written Mishna and Talmud or due to the advent of the printing press. However, I think we would all agree that the benefits of a written "Oral Law" that is accessible to all and cannot easily be forgotten, greatly outweigh the past benefits of an Oral Law that was truly oral. Our rabbis certainly did. And even though the collaborative process of copying manuscripts by hand must have been great for the copyists and led to many beautiful folios, we would all prefer the permanency and universal availability of the printed book. The current state technology is going through is a similarly epoch changing process. It is a brave new world with much to fear but at the same time even more to gain if harnessed thoughtfully and carefully by teachers interested in using it to find new, powerful tools to reach our students.

Kol tuv,
Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky
Director of Educational Technology
The Frisch School
Paramus, NJ

911 Lesson on Teshuva

2011-09-11T08:41:00.000-04:00

Below are two versions, a short one and an expanded version, of a 9/11 Lesson that I compiled a number of years ago. It connects the message of Rabbi Eliezer in Mishnah Avot and Gemara Shabbat to "Do Teshuva One Day Before You Die" with a famous poem that circulated the Internet for years after 9/11. When I teach this, I emphasize that Judaism is a religion that celebrates life and the message really is that one should live every day with no regrets. As the poem ends, "Take time to say "I'm sorry,""Please forgive me," "Thank you," or "It's okay."And if tomorrow never comes,you'll have no regrets about today."

Here are the lessons:

Short version:
911 Lesson- Teshuva

Longer Source Sheet:
911- Do Teshuva One Day Before You Die

Presentation on Flipping the Classroom

2011-08-29T23:00:00.000-04:00

Below please find a new Prezi that I just created on Flipping the Classroom. It is based on the ideas and discussions that I have been having these last six months on this blog thanks to the participation of many of you. As always, I welcome your constructive feedback.

One note. This is the first time that I have used Prezi in a number of months. As I have blogged previously, this program was always so innovative and powerful but had a steep learning curve. Not anymore! Prezi is now so easy to use. It comes with pre-made templates, paths that can be easily modified, and the ability to embed YouTube videos. What a difference between the older Beta Prezi version and this fully formed product! I highly recommend you give it a try to add spice to your presentations and avoid "Death by PowerPoint".

Flipping Out on Prezi

I'm Flipping Out

2011-08-24T21:13:00.001-04:00

This is cross-posted on my TanachRav blog.

I am planning to try the Flipped Classroom model this year in my Nach class. We are learning about Shivat Zion through Sefer Ezra/ Nechemiah, Chagai, Zechariah, and (maybe) Malachi.

Here are my first 5 videos on Ezra Chapters 1-3 with HW assignments as a Google Form for each of them. I welcome your constructive feedback.

1. Ezra Chapter 1, Verses 1-6

HW for "The Cyrus Proclamation

2. Ezra Chapter 1, Verses 7-11

HW for "The Return of the Vessels"

3. Ezra Chapter 2

HW for "Those Who Returned"

4. Ezra Chapter 3, Verses 1-7

HW for "The Building of the Altar"

5. Ezra Chapter 3 Verses, 8-13

HW for "Singing at the Rebuilding of the Temple"

Can Stanford University's Intro to Artificial Intelligence model be adapted for Torah courses?

2011-08-05T09:11:00.002-04:00

I just read about the fascinating Open Course being offered this fall by Stanford University, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Here is a blog post about it from Darcy Moore: Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and an article from the Atlantic: Take Stanford's 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence' Course. You can watch a video introduction of the course below.

What makes this course so unique and different from other Open Courseware like MIT's Open Courseware or YUTorah.org is you can not only watch the lectures and read the syllabus but you can submit homework, take exams, and be graded, all for free. Learning Lishma! It's kind of like the Nechama Liebowitz model with her Gilyonot that she mailed and graded worldwide but utilizing the Internet to make the process easier.

Is this model being used anywhere for Torah content? I know about YUTorah, Daf Yomi, Nach Yomi etc. I am asking about the aspect of the course where anyone can submit homework, exams, and grades so you are truly taking the course along with the participants in the brick and mortar school. This is what made Nechama Leibowitz's Gilyonot truly unique. (Actually her model was even more unique because there was no course in a brick and mortar school. It was all through her correspondence to her small apartment behind the old Central Bus Station in Jerusalem.) Does anyone have the time and resources to update this model for the 21st century להגדיל תורה ולהדירה?

Interesting Ways to use Technology for Mishna and Gemara in the Classroom

2011-07-30T23:26:00.002-04:00

I am preparing two courses in the fall on using technology to enhance Jewish Studies. The first is a senior elective in my school called Torah Tech which I have blogged about here. The second, is a new online class for teachers on using technology to teach Mishna and Gemara which I am developing for The MOFET Institute Online Academy for Jewish Studies. I need your help.

I plan to include many real-world examples of the use of technology in Mishna and Gemara instruction on the middle and high school levels. To accomplish this, I am taking a tip from Tom Barrett's famous Interesting Ways series to crowdsource good quality classroom ideas on the use of technology for Mishna and Gemara in the classroom. Below is a Google Docs Presentation that I started on Interesting Ways* to use Technology for Mishna and Gemara in the Classroom. I added the first idea but I invite you to add your own so this becomes a truly collaborative experience which should greatly benefit the knowledge base of Jewish education.

You can contribute to this presentation by using the following link which allows editing: Interesting Ways* to use Technology for Mishna and Gemara in the Classroom and adding a new slide for each of your ideas. The only thing that I ask is that you include your name and/or Twitter handle to your slide and that you publicize this project on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and other social media. Yeshar Kochachem!

Google University: Lecture 1: Searching Smarter

2011-07-04T10:23:00.002-04:00

The following posting is cross-posted on http://edtechexp.blogspot.com/.

A number of years ago, I had the privilege to work closely with a soft-spoken network administrator, Ken Dwyer, who seemed to have the answer to all of my technology questions at his fingertips. When I asked him how he knew so much, he answered "Google University". He was not referring to an educational institution sponsored by Google. Rather, he was referencing the power of Google as the repository of information, if you know how to find it. Since that conversation some seven years ago, Google University has greatly expanded it's "course offerings" to include a whole suite of knowledge tools all free of charge. The following, is my first in a series of postings I am planning based on information learned at the recent ISTE 2011 Conference on the power of Google University to transform our teaching and learning.

Lecture 1: Searching Smarter
Fundamentally, Google is a search engine, and every experienced user has developed their own strategies on how to find what they need using Google University. I will focus on some of the tools to refine one's search and filter the results that are less well-known.

Below is a sample Google search screen:

You will notice while typing that Google is already doing two things.
1) It starts showing results both from the Internet and results that Google has "starred" because they appear from your online Google bookmarks.
2) Google starts suggesting other longer searches that you might be interested in. If you watch what Google suggests and click on your desired search rather than continuing typing, it will save you time.

You will also notice tools to your lower left to further refine your results.
1. Sites with images: Results can be limited to sites with images, a handy tool for finding images. (I will focus on Google image search in my next posting.)

2. Related searches: This will give you a list of searches related to your search terms. This tool will help you to perfect your searching skills. If you are not sure exactly what to search for, just type anything into Google, even a question. If you do not find exactly what you are looking for, then click related searches to see other search terms you can use. (Another great tool for refining your search terms is the Google Wonder Wheel which I will talk about later in this posting.)

3. Timeline: With this tool, you can search for items relevant to a range of years and then view your answers sorted along a time line.

For example, let's say you do a search for Abraham. You could be searching for Abraham Lincoln or Abraham, the first of the Avot (Patriarches) in the Tanach. Through the timeline, you can easily limit your search to Abraham from the Bible by only looking for results from the range of 2000-1500BCE.

4. Time: You can also filter your searches by time. This is different from the Timeline because you are not searching for results about a specific time period. Rather, you are searching for websites created after a certain time. This is great for researching something that has changed in the recent past.

For example, let's say I want to know why the Google Wonder Wheel no longer is listed in the Google search tools. (I will describe the Wonder Wheel's great utility later in the posting based on my experiences using it just last week but for now it has mysteriously disappeared.) You can search for "Google Wonder Wheel" and limit your search to the past week.

5. Wonder Wheel: I will end this lecture by discussing the Wonder Wheel, a great tool for seeing related searches.

For example, let's say you start by searching for Twitter. You can refine your search further using the wonder wheel to search for Twitter Teaching tools. This will bring up, further categories to search for like flickr teaching tools, facebook teaching tools, or youtube teaching tools. Every time, you click on a category, it opens a new search and if you select to view all results, instead of the Wonder Wheel, you will then see all results for that search term. I would tell you to give the Wonder Wheel a try but for some reason it has disappeared. Hopefully it will come back soon.

This ends my first Google University lecture on Searching Smarter. Stay tuned for future lectures on Google Image Search, Google News, Scholar, and other search tools, Google Docs, and much more.

Top Ten Free Educational Technology Applications I Learned (More) About at #ISTE11

2011-06-30T12:47:00.006-04:00

The following posting is cross-posted on http://edtechexp.blogspot.com/.

Top Ten lists are always a fun but challenging exercise. It is fun to collect and share new ideas, Web 2.0 applications, resources etc. That is what I use Twitter for all the time. (As an aside, I have started using Twitter for all my social bookmarking instead of sites like Delicious. With a web app called Trunk.ly all my tweets with links are fully archived and searchable.) The challenge of Top Ten lists is limiting yourself to ten resources. For this posting, I will limit my list to new resources I learned about at the ISTE 2011 Conference or innovative applications of resources that I already use. Here it goes in descending order.

10. Avatar Creator: http://myavatareditor.com/ This is a cute web app for creating avatars that looks exactly like the Miis from the Nintendo Wii. I learned about this from Tammy Worcester in her excellent presentation on Tammy's Top Twenty Favorite Web Tools. I have already used this to change my Twitter profile pic. I showed it to my kids and they loved it too.

Applications for education: You might want to have students create avatars for various characters in the book their reading or in a story from Tanach. My daughter pointed out that you can't change the avatar's clothes or background so you might want to have the students save their avatar as a JPG with a transparent background and then put it into a PowerPoint or Google Presentation slide complete with a setting from the story.

9. U.R.L. Shorteners: http://fur.ly/ and http://bitly.com/bundles/ Anyone who uses Twitter knows about U.R.L. or website shorteners designed to shorten longer website so you can fit them into the 140 character limit of twitter. However, these two are different. They allow you to shorten a number of websites into one website address.

http://fur.ly/, which I also learned about from Tammy Worcester, lets you navigate with an arrow on the top of the page between each site.
http://bitly.com/bundles/, which I learned about from fellow Avi Chai ISTE participant and technogenius Adam Simon, gives you all the URLs in a list. Please note that Bitly requires you to login to create a bundle of shortened links.
For this posting, I have shortened all of the links on this Top Ten in fur.ly: http://fur.ly/5tt6 and in Bitly Bundles: http://bitly.com/myiWPH. After using both apps, I would say that Fur.ly is more user friendly for the student accessing the links due to the top navigation bar while Bitly Bundles is more reliable in creating links. My Bitly bundle worked the first time while I had to play with Fur.ly a number of times to get all of the links to work.
Applications for education: Both these tools are perfect for online research assignments or WebQuests. All you need to give the students is one easy link and they can access all your sites. This is also a necessity when creating QR codes which I discuss below. QR codes require a short website address in order to simplify the code and scan more reliably. Either of these sites would be great to shorten links before converting them into the QR code for scanning.

8. QR Code Generator: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ This is a simple QR code generator. You paste the website address (which you have already shortened using the tools above) or a phone number, text, or SMS message. This site then coverts it into a QR code graphic that can be scanned with a number of free apps available for various smartphones. For a basic tutorial of QR codes, you can look at this QR Code Implementation Guide from Vicki Davis.

Applications for Education: Adam Simon told me about a wonderful project that he made using QR Codes with his Jewish History students. Students in grades 9-12 populating a giant timeline from the Jewish Year 0 through 5771 based on the time period they were learning. Instead of posting physical artifacts on the timeline which would have been way too cluttered and impossible to manage, they posted QR Codes. These codes could link to rich muli-media content the students created online. Whenever students scanned each QR code with their smartphone, they learned more about each time period. This is an awesome idea and proved to me that QR codes in education are not just a new shtick but can truly be used to do innovative things that cannot be easily accomplished any other way. I am looking forward to thinking up and hearing about more examples of utilizing QR codes in Jewish education.

7. Sketching: http://sketch.odopod.com/ This is an app to make sketches online. What sets this app apart, besides the fact that it's free and very easy to use, is that you can embed it on any wiki or blog and play back these sketch back to watch how it was drawn. Here is an example created by my 10 year old daughter right after I showed her the app upon returning from the conference.

Applications for Education: For an art class, this tool is invaluable. The teacher or her students can draw with a mouse or with their fingers on a Smart Board or on individual iPads. They can then demonstrate to others how they created the sketch so everyone can study the technique used. This would also be great for projects in Tanach where students are asked to create a sketch illustrating a specific story, event, or verse.

6. Real-time Student Response: http://wiffiti.com/ This real-time student response system is very similar to Poll Everywhere which I was already familiar with and have utilized to great effect with my classes. (For more information, see my blog posting on Poll Everywhere in Techrav.) What sets Wiffiti apart is that the student responses, which are generated using text messaging on their cell phone, are displayed as notes on a wall with a background of your choosing. You can see an example here from the workshop that I went on
7 Free Mobile Participation Tools for Classrooms given by Michael Dreyfus.

Applications for Education: This would be great as a student response tool especially when you do not want student responses threaded based on time of response as they are in Poll Everywhere. Every response is always on the page and you merely need to navigate to it to zoom in on it. This would be great for brainstorming ideas or answering open ended questions in real-time.

5. Online Graphing Calculator: http://desmos.com/calculator/ What sets this apart besides the fact that it's web based so students don't have to worry about forgetting their TI calculators is the beauty of the graphs that are created. Links to these graphs can also be easily shared and embedded. Here is an example of the graph of a circle with a radius of 4.

Applications for Education: This can be used for teacher or student created graphs to share in an online course management system, wiki, or Google site.

4. Google Trips: http://www.personal.psu.edu/uxg3/blogs/googleearthquest/ and http://googletreks.org/ I am sure that many of you have already used Google Maps and Google Earth both for personal and educational use. These two websites contain ideas for creating educational trips using these tools. One can use My Places in Google Maps to easily add placemarkers which can also be embedded with rich multi-media including text, pictures, Youtube videos, and links. Dr. Alice Christie who created the Google Treks recommends using Google Maps over Google Earth since it is much less taxing on network resources, totally browser based, and can be launched in Google Earth anyways.

Applications for Education: This would be great for student projects in Tanach, history, science, or English, where students created maps with placemarkers describing the various significant places appearing in the unit studied. Both websites referenced above contain many examples of this.

3. Notetaking: http://www.evernote.com/ This site allows you to save notes anywhere complete with text, files, pictures, and even snapshots of websites. These notes can be accessed on your PC or Mac, smartphone, or on the web and whenever you change a note in one place it immediately syncs to all your other devices. As Tammy Worcester says, you can use Dropbox to organize your files and Evernote to organize your life.

Applications for Education: To help our teachers and students get organized and never miss an idea again. Students can use this for notetaking in school with or without wireless connectivity, putting notes in folders based on subject, and notes will automatically sync everywhere the next time they are connected to the Internet.

2. Global Communications: http://www.skype.com/ I know that this is a tool that most of us, including myself, already know about and use extensively. What I saw in a presentation by Alan November was how to use this as a global learning tool. A school in Boston, Massachusetts partnered with a school in England for an eighth grade engineering class. They had four different Skype sessions going on simultaneously as different teams learned together in real-time how to solve problems like creating more efficient wind turbines. The students in England were more advanced in their scientific knowledge so they tutored the students from the United States. Students from Boston commented that they learned more from their peers across the ocean than they would have ever learned from their teachers since they were kids and spoke the same language.

Applications for Education: This presentation was a real eye opener for me on the potential for global communications. We already have partnerships in my school with a number of Israeli high schools but I would like to expand and deepen these relationships into more real-time collaboration and create partnerships with other Jewish day schools throughout the Diaspora.

1. Screen and Videosharing: http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ If you do not already use Jing, you must give it a try. It is a free PC or Mac app to take a screenshot with visual explanations. An example appears below. What I did not know before Tammy Worcester's presentation is that you can also record videocasts of everything you are doing on your screen with audio explanations. I cannot wait to start using this with my teachers.

Applications for Education: This is a great way to show your students "exactly what you are seeing" on the page to give step by step instructions or to create step-by-step video instructions as well. Students can also create instructions for their peers on how to certain tasks since the best way to truly learn something is to go through the steps in order to teach it to someone else.

This ends my Top Ten List from the ISTE Conference 2011. I welcome you to add some of your favorite free educational applications by commenting to this posting!

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the Avi Chai foundation for sponsoring my trip to ISTE. It was an eye opening experience. The chance to share this experience with my peers in Jewish Educational Technology through the Avi Chai cohort greatly deepened and enriched my learning and thinking. Hopefully we can get together in the future for similar experiences.

The 20 Percent Difference: What Schools Can Learn From Google

2011-06-26T23:38:00.002-04:00

The following posting is cross-posted on http://edtechexp.blogspot.com/.

Today was my first day at the ISTE Conference in Philadelphia, PA. I decided to come up early before the late afternoon Keynote by Dr. John Medina and signed up for a full day workshop on Google Apps for Administrators. I was blown away. So much to digest...

The Google Wonder Wheel for visual search; Google timeline to search for articles by year and month; Google News archives going back hundreds of years; Using Google Forms as a method of gaining instant audience feedback; Using Google Moderator to pose questions which the audience rates by importance; Creating Word Clouds in Google spreadsheets; Setting up Google sites; Becoming a Gmail Ninja... The list goes on and on. I highly recommend you search the following twitter hashtag from the workshop to further explore these and many more topics covered: #gwaiste11.

How is Google able to consistently create so many innovative tools? The answer lies in the Google credo of 20% time. Google gives its employees 20% of their time to work on their own pet projects independent of their regular responsibilities. This time for innovation, reflection, and creativity allows technicians to follow their passion wherever it may lead. It might become the next great Google product or it might lead to nowhere. Google doesn't mind. Google has embedded into the weekly schedule time for Limud Lishmo, learning for learning's sake.

This got me thinking... Schools are the ultimate knowledge industry. Our teachers are expert technicians trained to gain the most from our products, our students, in terms of skills and information gained. Do we give our teachers 20% time to work on projects of their choosing? Do our teachers give their students 20% time for their own learning? I am not saying that we should not focus on curriculum, benchmarks, and standards. These should be the main aspiration of the 80% of the time spent on structured pursuits. However, at the same time, do we give our teachers and students the opportunity to discover new things and the breathing room to develop and refine these ideas?

Dr. John Medina formulated this challenge at the end of his Keynote address this afternoon. He was responding to the question, "Where does teaching to the test fit into his theory of mind?" His response, "The human brain is not interested in learning but in survival. By teaching to the test, learning becomes about survival and not about fascination with knowledge." We must strive to bring back our student's fascination with knowledge.

I believe that we can accomplish this by taking the lesson from Google and giving them 20% time. This does not necessarily mean that teachers and students can do anything, but, within the loose framework of the curriculum, of the Navi studied or the Mesechta learned, we can allow our teachers and students the choice of how they will learn at least 20% of the time. We will all be pleasantly surprised by the great things they will accomplish with this.

Tweeting Shabbos (Reminders) and Sefirat Ha'Omer Too!!!

2011-05-08T11:45:00.012-04:00

Twitter is a great tool for learning, sharing, and accessing real-time data about emerging events. I use my Twitter account as my own Personal Learning Network by following like-minded Jewish educators and educational technologists so I can stay ahead of the learning curve in discovering emerging technologies and reading about their applications to the classroom. For example, when Osama Bin Laden, Twitter was my first source of information. It gave me insight into the mood of the nation and the world (or at least the part of the world using Twitter). Reading about The 10 Most Tweeted Verses in Response to Bin Laden's Death and listening to shiurim tweeted by YUTorah.org helped me frame my religious feelings about the event, advancing my personal Limud Torah and leading to fruitful conversations and chavruta sessions with my students.

I have recently discovered a new use for Twitter, Shabbos and Sefirat Ha'Omer reminders. After blogging about the almost addictive attraction that some "frum" teens have to texting on Shabbos, I decided to use that same technology as a weapon against Shabbos desecration. I started tweeting weekly reminders to my students to turn off their cell phones before Shabbos together with the candle lighting time for my home town, West Orange, NJ. This was highly successful. I even had some of my students who told me that they started following me on Twitter just to get the Shabbos candle lighting times.

When my friend and programmer extraordinaire, David Goldstein, saw these tweets, he decided to test his coding skills by building a Twitter app for me to automatically send these tweets around 2 hours before Shabbos. You can see an example of this reminder below:

During Chol Hamoed Pesach, I then asked David if he could design a similar reminder for Sefirat Ha'Omer. Due to the 140 character limitations of Twitter, it would not tweet the whole text of the day's counting but a reminder of what day it is together with shortened link to the text of the day's complete counting with the bracha. This tweet was set up to send the new counting daily at 7:30PM EST Monday through Friday and 10:00PM on Motzi Shabbat. (I would not want any of these tweets going out on Shabbos because it might be maris ayin.) Here is an example of this reminder:

After many retweets of these reminders, users started to contact me and David requesting ways that these reminders could be sent to their Twitter stream and could be personalized for their candle lighting times. For Sefirat Ha'Omer, this was relatively easy. David Goldstein set up a new Twitter account @countsefira. If you follow this account you get two daily reminders, one at night (around 7:30PM EST) to count with a bracha and the other the following morning, in case your forgot, to count without a bracha. Here's today's reminder:

The personalized Shabbos reminder was obviously a more complex programming feat but David pulled it off. This feature also has a Twitter account, @ShabbosStarts, but I recommend against following this account since you would then receive candle lighting reminders for any person and location that has signed up for this service. Rather you can choose from one of the following options:

1. For a one-time candle lighting reminder, tweet: @shabbosstarts Your Zipcode
This will return a reply message to you within 15 minutes with the candle lighting time. An example for West Orange, NJ appears below:

Example input: @shabbosstarts 07052
Example:

Please note a limitation on this Shabbos reminder. It automatically checks for new messages every 15 minutes and sends out a tweet to a maximum of 20 users. This means that, the way it is currently set up, if more than 20 users tweet to @shabbosstarts within a 15 minute minute span then it will only send reminders to the first 20. Therefore, if you do not receive a reminder within 15 minutes, I suggest that you first try tweeting again before contacting me or David Goldstein.

2. For a reminder closer to Shabbos, tweet: @shabbosstarts #remind Your Zipcode
This will return a reply within 15 minutes and another reminder two hours before Shabbos.

3. For a weekly reminder, tweet: @shabbosstarts #weekly Zipcode
This will return a weekly reply two hours before every Shabbos.
To cancel this weekly reminder, tweet: @shabbosstarts #cancel Zipcode

I would like to thank David Goldstein for all of his hard work, purely on a voluntarily basis, in creating these valuable Twitter services for the benefit of Kelal Yisrael. If you have any further ideas for similar Jewish Twitter apps you can comment to this posting or contact David directly @golddave.

Cognitive Surplus and the Fifth Son Project

2011-04-17T00:56:00.010-04:00

One of my greatest pleasures as a teacher is meeting passionate students and, with just a little bit of guidance, watching them turn their dreams into a reality. As the Talmud says (Sanhedrin 105b), "A person can be jealous of anyone except for his son and his student." When my students surpass me, it gives me great pride.

A few weeks ago, in my posting on Children in a Digital Age (which you can read here or here), I described just such a group of students who formed the fledgling organization, StudentsUnite4Israel.org. I used them as an example of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Clay Shirky describes how the increase in leisure time since World War II has led to a Cognitive Surplus where people for the first time have a great deal of free time to spend on worthwhile endeavors. Until recently, however, most of this time was devoted by the overwhelming majority of the population to passive forms of entertainment like watching television. With the advent of the Internet and social media, people are just beginning to use some of this free time for more active pursuits.

Shirky describes four levels of these pursuits. Personal sharing, is where people share parts of their personal lives in the form of text, pictures, or videos on blogs or sites like Facebook and YouTube. Communal sharing, involves a more coordinated shared effort on the part of a group. Public sharing, is where similar minded people actively create something for the public good like the open source software movement where people collaborate on their free time to improve software that all can benefit from. Finally, Civic sharing where a group actively seeks to transform society. StudentsUnite4Israel.org is a great example of Civic sharing with high school students devoting their free time to advocating on behalf of the State of Israel and its people.

I remember two years ago when a freshman, Eric Tepper, first came to me with his dream of creating this world-wide student-run organization. I loved the way he dreamed big and possessed the passion and work ethic to make them become a reality so I helped him create a Students4Israel Wiki. Then he was joined this year by a sophomore, Ezra Gontownik, who was also a big dreamer, a hard-worker, and was passionate about political advocacy on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people. Together they wished to create a full-fledged website. I showed them the nuts and bolts of basic web design and warned them that, if they were really interested in succeeding, they had to work quickly and constantly update their site in order to keep up with the fast changing world of the web. Less than two weeks later, I was sitting at my school dinner proof-reading their website on my BlackBerry, as my students were feverishly sending me emails back and forth. Even after the site went live, I did not really understand the power of these students efforts until their first big project, The Gilad Shalit -- Fifth Son Project.

The Gilad Shalit -- Fifth Son Project is designed to raise awareness amongst Jews world-wide about the continued imprisonment of Gilad Shalit at the hands of Hamas. The idea is to create postcards people could use at their Passover Seder to remember Gilad Shalit as the Fifth Son, the son who is absent from the Seder. You can see an example of the postcard below:

Courtesy of http://studentsunite4israel.org/.


Courtesy of http://studentsunite4israel.org/.

The statistics of what these students have already accomplished with this project are staggering. Tens of thousands of these postcards have been distributed world-wide. They have attracted over 30 participating schools in over 10 states nation-wide. They have just been featured in a front page cover story by the local Jewish paper, the Jewish Standard in The Fifth Son Project, and in the leading editorial by The Jewish Week, the top Jewish newspaper in the NY/NJ area, A Night Of Watching For Shalit. I am so tremendously impressed and honestly flabbergasted by what these teens have done. I can't wait to see what future projects are in store for these amazing kids.

I now have an answer to those who say that kids should be banned from using social media because it can only lead to trouble. I never thought that it was productive to create new bans for our children (see this video for an example of one principal's attempt to do exactly that: N.J. Principal Calls for Social Network Ban and this video response: Response to Principal Who Bans Social Media). Rather, parents and teachers should guide them and help them to harness the awesome power that this new media can provide when used in constructive directions. We should give our children positive examples to aspire to. To begin with, we can show them the great work of StudentsUnite4Israel.org.

Using the Web for Passover Prep

2011-04-11T10:33:00.003-04:00

In case you are looking for some last minute Passover lesson ideas for the few days of school left before Passover, I am republishing my blog post from last year below. This post features a simple Passover WebQuest which might be worthwhile for your students.

I also recommend the following more recent links:

Pesach Resources from the Lookstein Center: A list of original Pesach lesson plans, project ideas and articles created by Lookstein Center staff or contributed to site by Jewish educators.
Yeshiva University's Pesach To-Go 5771: Pesach articles on Halakha and Machshava from various Roshei Yeshiva from YU.
Giving a Haggadah a Makeover: Article from the New York Times about Maxwell House's attempt to redo their classic Haggadah with a gender-neutral translation. Personally, I object to to this; "the 4 different sorts of children" does not resonate the way "the 4 sons" does. However, it is worth reading and might be a subject for an interesting class discussion about the role of translations in interpreting our Jewish liturgy.
http://www.amit.org.il/hagim/pesach/hagada.htm: Link to many Haggadot and commentaries.
Full Hebrew text of the Haggadah

Here is my posting from last year. I invite people to add more Passover links in the Comments to this posting.
A number of years ago, I started creating Internet scavenger hunts where students were asked a series of questions like a standard worksheet which they could only use specific websites to answer.

My goal was two-fold: 1) to introduce students to various Jewish websites and illustrate their usefulness in answering real world problems and 2) to create hands-on activities for students to discover the answers to halachic questions themselves instead of the boring lecture style so common for classes in Jewish law. I felt that as a Torah teacher who wanted to foster life-long learning in my students, I could not guarantee that they would always have access to Jewish teachers or seforim especially when living on college campus. But I knew that they would always have access to the Internet. If they realized that they could use the Internet to help answer questions as advanced as "How to kasher your kitchen for Passover?" and as basic as "When is Shabbat candle lighting this week?" then this might just strengthen their Jewish identity and their ties to Talmud Torah and Shemirat Hamitzvot. I also wanted to point them to legitimate Jewish websites and resources since unfortunately so much online is still of questionable origin and dubious authority.

Two of my worksheets appear below. The first is a pretty high level worksheet on the laws of Passover based mostly on one of my favorite websites both for Jewish content and it's fun sense of style kosher4passover.com.

Here it is:
Internet Worksheet on Hilchot Pesach

The second is a more basic Internet Jewish Scavenger Hunt designed for students of all levels.
Here it is:
Internet Jewish World Scavenger Hunt

Please feel free to share these with your own classes and tell me how it goes. Happy Passover and Chag Sameach!

The Pros and Cons of Khan Academy

2011-04-10T01:32:00.011-04:00

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I should say that on the average we get 2% efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture... where it should be possible to obtain 100% efficiency. (Thomas Edison, 1922, cited in Teachers and machines: the classroom use of technology since 1920, by Larry Cuban).

Generations, young boys twenty two or twenty three, and my generation, the generation of Rav Hayyim Brisker, of the Shakh… of Rabbenu Tam, Rav Hai Ga’on, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Elazar, and Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakai… We all speak one language… We all chat. We all laugh. We all enjoy the company. We all pursue one goal. We all are committed to a common vision and we all operate with the same categories. There is Mesorah collegiality, friendship, comity between old and young between antiquity and Middle Ages and modern times… This unity of generations, this march of centuries, this conversation of generations this dialogue between antiquity and present will finally bring the redemption of the Jew. (Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Uniting of Generations-Pidyon Haben”, 1974, cited in The Role Of Teacher and Student in Jewish Education According to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik by Tzvi Pittinsky)

It is difficult for a student of any age to learn by listening alone, by passive absorption. He needs activity, to exercise his abilities, to overcome difficulties, to wrestle with the subject matter until he overcomes it. Passivity in class weakens the muscles, saps the student's spiritual abilities which are given no opportunity for exercise and leads to drowsiness and sleep. (Nehama Leibowitz in Torah Insights, 1995)

I soon discovered that people all over the world were watching my YouTube videos. More important, teachers were using them to change the basic rhythm of their classrooms. They asked their students to watch the videos at home and then used class time for actual problem-solving. Instead of 30 students listening passively to a one-size-fits-all lecture, they were learning at their own speed. Some could focus on filling in gaps in their arithmetic while others were able to jump ahead to trigonometry -- and it all took place in the same classroom. It is often said that technology makes modern life less personal, but in this case, it has allowed teachers to take a big step toward humanizing their instruction. (Salman Khan in Turning the Classroom Upside Down from The Wall Street Journal, 4/9/2011)

Last week, in the spirit of Salman Khan and the "flipped classroom model", I flipped my blog and, instead of sharing my thoughts, I merely described Khan's approach and asked for your feedback. You can read this posting together with the interesting responses that I received in What do you think of Salman Khan and the "Flipped Classroom"?

In analyzing my own opinion on this approach, I am torn. In my heart, I would love for this approach to work. Who would not want to use technology to allow students to learn at their own pace, facilitate more individualized teacher-student instruction, and thus humanize the classroom? Salman Khan elaborates on his approach in his recent Wall Street Journal Editorial, Turning the Classroom Upside Down and in an interview that appears below:

However, upon further thought, I wonder how this would work in a Yeshiva Day School setting for multiple subjects in both General and Judaic Studies. Rabbi Yisroel Pollack, sent me the following blog posting which lists, in excruciating detail, the many hurdles which would need to be addressed in trying to introduce the "flipped classroom" systematically into a school. You can read it here: To flip or not to flip.

I am worried that the tremendous enthusiasm currently surrounding this new approach of using online video to "flip the class" is eerily similar to the hype that surrounded earlier technologies that were supposed to revolutionize education. Larry Cuban, noted technology skeptic, in his classic book on this subject, Teachers and machines: the classroom use of technology since 1920, describes a cycle that new technologies followed. It begins with big promises that a new technology will transform education. This is followed by teachers failing to adopt this new approach. Instead of blaming the technology, administrators cite a lack of sufficient funding and teacher training for the failure, and the cycle continues. I have described this cycle in a Prezi that I created on The Rationale for Using Educational Technology. Will efforts to bring the Khan Academy into schools follow this same cycle?

My misgivings are both practical and fundamental. On a practical level, is it possible for students to watch 10-20 minute videos for each of their classes in a Jewish middle school or high school where students study, on average, 8-9 subjects a day? This would require 80 to 180 minutes of homework a night just watching online videos!

Furthermore, I wonder if this approach will work for the majority of our subjects. Even the Khan Academy only has videos on math and science. In researching this posting, I watched a number of these videos. I found the math videos to be compelling especially when accompanied by the online activities that Khan Academy offers. However, I did not think the videos in biology were as worthwhile.

The reason I think hints to a fundamental difference between mathematics and almost every other subject. Math is almost entirely about skills acquisition. One learns the skills to solve an equation, practices that skill set on a number of similar problems, and then moves on. These skills are often sequential and cumulative. The analogy that Salman Khan makes to riding a bicycle in his TED video is very apt. Learning to do math seems very similar to learning to ride a bike. But how many other subjects are like this? Certainly, Chumash and Gemara have skills but these skills are intertwined with concepts, ideas, questions, answers, and proofs. Can a Khan type of approach really do justice to this?

On a more fundamental level, I wonder if watching videos about Gemara, Chumash, and Navi prior to class will really be that compelling. In the passages that I began this discussion with, I quoted from The Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who describes learning as a dialogue between teacher and student, and with all of the generations of Torah scholars that preceded them. This is the way that we Jews have been learning for time immemorial. It is the approach of the Ba'ayot De'Abbaye Ve'Rabba, the Socratic method of questioning and answering, the Shakla VeTarya, that has made Limud Torah so unique and enjoyable. Can this really be given justice in a YouTube video? As Rabbi Pollack said in his comment to my previous posting, would this not take away the geshmak in learning?

Nehama Leibowitz, who I also mentioned above, cited a different issue. The worst type of learning by everyone's admission is passive absorption or as Salman Khan derisively describes, the "one-size-fits-all lecture". So we are going to solve this problem by having students watch a video lecture at home? What more passive experience could there be! Furthermore, Khan makes a false dichotomy between the "one-size-fits-all lecture" which he believes is the primary mode of instruction today and his approach where students watch the lecture at home and then collaboratively solve problems in school. I do not think that this is a valid description of most teaching and learning in Yeshiva day schools today.

I will use my own classroom as an example. I rarely lecture. I ask questions that students must respond to in writing or through class discussions. I call on students to read. I require students to pose questions to me and to each other. I assign chavruta work in which students work in pairs. I give projects in which students learn much of the material on their own. I use interactive activities on the Smart Board, show videos, manipulate text to find key words and concepts etc. etc. etc. I don't think my class is unique. This is the way any good teacher teaches.

I am very afraid that a Khan Academy type of approach will merely relegate me to a talking head or worse, a computer technician behind a screen watching the "data" come in as students perform rote exercises so that I can "intervene" for the student with the red danger line. This is not education. As I described in my previous posting on Skype in the Classroom, no technology should ever be used to replace good teachers. That is what I am worried Khan Academy could become.

I salute Salman Khan. He has designed an excellent supplement to classroom instruction. It could serve as a great review after the lesson, or for the student who needs extra support, or even, occasionally, for the student demanding further enrichment. But it should never replace the dialogue between teacher, student, and text that has always been the hallmark of every good Judaic Studies classroom.

Skype in the Classroom

2011-04-08T14:43:00.002-04:00

One of the most exciting technologies in the last few years is Skype. I don't think that our students realize how cool this is; literally, the Jetson's video phone has come to life. However, just because something is exciting and cool does not mean it is always a good fit for education. One must put a great deal of thought and planning to design an effective Skype lesson.

First, let me share what I strongly believe Skype should NOT be used for. Skype should never be used to replace good teachers. This is a topic that I will be revisiting in a future follow-up posting on Khan Academy. Nothing can replace an effective teacher directly interacting with her students. A teacher can walk the room redirecting students who are off-task, checking for understanding, and calling on students during the course of a discussion. None of this can be done via Skype.

I find similar difficulty when giving webinars. Since I am looking at a computer screen instead of a class full of students, perhaps using a small webcam, it is very hard to gauge students interest and engagement. I find that I become more of a "talking head" going through a lecture with the help of PowerPoint slides and screen-sharing. While I only interact with students when they pose questions via chat or ask the occasional audio question. I also find that I gain a great deal of energy from being in front of students. I feel like I am on a stage putting on a performance. This type of positive enthusiasm is harder to generate on Skype.

Let me make it clear. I agree that there is a place for Skype and these experiences can be quite meaningful for our students. However, this is only when there is clear added value for using this medium which cannot be easily done face to face. For example, if through Skype or similar video platforms, I can easily interact with a class of students from another country or connect students from many different locations then that is a great added value that only Skype or similar platforms can provide. When using Skype for these reasons, care should be given to always have a teacher in the room so that the important educational tasks that I described above can be accomplished through direct face-to-face communication.

Here are three recent examples of Skype that I have done at my school. I am sure that there are many others that people can share with me by commenting on this posting.

This past year we Skyped graduation. We had three seniors who were already in Israel learning in Yeshiva in preparation for their service in the Israel Defense Forces. Through Skype, these students were able to attend their graduation. They watched the entire graduation from the Western Wall in Jerusalem and at specific moments of graduation each of them appeared on the big screen so they could be seen by family and friends "accepting" their diplomas just like their fellow students.
For Yom Yerushalayim, we had a class Skype with an American Oleh in Gush Etzion who shared his personal experiences being in Israel during the 6 Day War. For this presentation, we were able to involve 3 classes who were all able to hear from the Oleh and then ask him questions about his experience.
Just yesterday, we connected one of our classes with a class in one of our sister schools, Ulpanat Harel of Nahariya, Israel via Skype. You can read details about this class here: Skype Conference @FrischSchool with Ulpanat Harel, Nahariya, Israel. In this class, I saw an interesting transformation occur. At the beginning of the lesson, it seemed that students were merely making personal speeches with little interaction with their peers. As the lesson continued, a genuine dialogue started to occur so that by the end of the period it almost felt as if we were in the same room as our fellow students who were across the globe. We wished we could have continued for much longer as the conversation became increasingly more rich and tremendously enjoyable.

It is these types of valuable experiences, when computers are used to accomplish educational goals that cannot be easily reached any other way, that makes educational technology so exciting.

Review of (and Supplement to) Yeshiva University's Children in a Digital Age: Parent Guide

2011-04-03T22:35:00.001-04:00

Photo by Kiifu licensed under Creative Commons.

In a talk on the Impact of Technology and Contemporary Culture on Jewish Life, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt describes the tremendous pace of change in today's society. In past centuries, if one wanted to experience change, one traveled in space. A trip around the next hill might reveal an entirely new culture complete with a different language, economy, entertainment, and form of government. However, one could live for decades or even centuries in the same location and see little if any change. Today's society is reversed. We live in a global culture. One can travel anywhere in the world and find people dressed in the same styles with the same shopping malls and popular entertainment. However, because of the rapid advancements in technology, if one wants to experience change, one merely needs to wait a few years or sometimes even a few months (not the 70 years of Choni Hama'agel's slumber) to behold an entirely different society.

This is what makes a parent's guide to the digital age such a necessity. Many parents have trouble keeping up with their children as they navigate the ever changing world of new media. They need guidance and Yeshiva University's Institute for University-School Partnership has provided it with its Children in a Digital Age: Parent Guide (PDF). However, this very difficulty is inherent in any attempt to write a guide to this digital age. By the time the guide is published and disseminated, it is already obsolete; much like last year's revolutionary iPad was quickly supplanted by the iPad2, with its dual cameras, faster processor, and sleeker design. With that in mind, my review of the Children in a Digital Age: Parent Guide will be less of a review than a supplement. Since the time that this guide was compiled in November 2010, much has changed or come to the fore on the subject of technology in the Jewish community.

This guide contains much useful material. I found the section on cyberbullying to be particularly compelling and on target. In my mind, this issue is the biggest problem that our children face in using technology today. TV has sensationalized the fear of Internet predators as in the popular Dateline NBC series. However, most of our kids have much more to fear from the "friends" they know posting hurtful and/or inappropriate comments or pictures than from some anonymous predators who lurk in cyberspace. As a supplement to what is in the guide, this recent blog post on Facebook Friending 101 for Schools should be required reading for our parents, teachers, and administrators.

Here are four additional supplementary items that I wish to see added or changed for the next edition of this guide. Perhaps Yeshiva University can adopt a wiki model for these types of guides so that they can be constantly revised by multiple authors as technology continues to transform our kids' lives in new and unanticipated ways.

1. The Emergence of New Social Media Sites

Concerning social media, the guide lists MySpace and Facebook as the two main sites that our children visit. This is only partially correct. While Facebook is by far the most popular social network for our children in middle and high school, MySpace is not, to my knowledge, used by our students anymore. In fact, MySpace has become such a sordid environment that I would be alarmed if I discovered that one of my children was using it. On the other hand, many of our students have started using other forms of social media like Google Buzz and Twitter.

Usage of Google Buzz might surprise some people since it has been maligned by the media as a failure. However, for our younger children, it is often the entry point into the world of social media. This is for a very simple reason; it is integrated into Gmail. Since most children get their first Gmail account by the time they are nine or ten, they automatically have a method of communicating and posting pictures, links, and videos with their peers -- Google Buzz. Kids figure this out pretty quickly. I remember looking over my daughter's shoulder when she was eleven and seeing her entire class having discussions on Google Buzz. None of these children would have been allowed by their parents on Facebook but they were using Google Buzz because it was readily available. This leads to a greater lesson about the ubiquity of social media today. It is everywhere. Short of banning the Internet entirely, I do not think there is an effective way of keeping our children from using it. If one seeks to ban it in one form, our children will merely find another way to use it.

Twitter has been adopted by a sizable minority of our older teenagers. It is still primarily used by twenty and thirty-somethings but some of our high school students have adopted it as an easy way of sharing information or following their favorite celebrities. The public nature of Twitter is alarming for our children and probably the primary reason that most kids do not use it. But, for that very reason, those who use it tend to be much more careful on it than they are on Facebook, which is obviously a plus.

2. The Convergence of Technology Platforms

The most important recent transformation in social networking is not the specific sites our children are accessing but the convergence of technologies which serve as platforms for these sites. The challenge is no longer about putting parental controls on the desktop or laptop computer and keeping that computer in a public place. Our students are accessing social media everywhere, using their cell phone, iPod Touch, iPad, Kindle, etc. If they own a wifi-enabled device and live in a home that has wifi then they have full access to social media.

Philip Rosenthal, a noted Internet safety expert, has compared giving one's child an iPod Touch to giving him a loaded gun. This obvious hyperbole points to the destruction that these devices can cause when used carelessly. The issue is not isolated to Facebook since our children can just as easily send disturbing content via text, instant message, or video chat. Posting disturbing content is not the only problem our community faces. With his recent articles on Half Shabbos, Prof. Alan Brill has brought to the forefront the issue of otherwise "frum" teenagers who are so addicted to their electronic devices that they cannot even stop texting on Shabbos. So what can we do to combat this?

3. Strategies for addressing these issues

In addition to the advice in the parent's guide, our community could benefit from the advice of our rabbanim and academics in these areas. Here is a survey of some recent shiurim on this topic posted on YUTorah.org. Rabbi Jeremy Wieder in a Sichos Mussar on Internet and Technology discusses the lack of Tzniut that these technologies foster. We live in a society where many people seek to broadcast their every action through Facebook, Youtube, and the like. This is especially problematic for teenagers who are naturally self-absorbed. Besides the content of these "broadcasts," which can be very alarming, the very idea that others are interested in our every action in itself is a problem that we need to discuss with our children.

Rabbi Mordechai Willig in a talk on The Internet - The danger, Issur Yichud, the importance of filters and 'Areivim' discusses his desire to add a new "Issur Yichud" when using the Internet. He believes that one should not go online unless one is in a public place where there is a distinct possibility that one can be interrupted by others. This advice, which might be good for adults, is imperative for our children. Even with the preponderance of devices, our children should know that we are always watching them no matter what device they may be using.

I remember a talk on this topic that Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz gave to a group of parents. One parent asked him what they should do if their child wanted to join Facebook. His response was to join Facebook with him and friend him on the social networking site. The guide also recommended this even if one's child resents it. My experience is that if we friend our children as a condition to allowing them to join Facebook, they won't resent it. They will appreciate the fact that we let them join in an open and honest way. It is when one attempts to friend one's children after they have been on Facebook for a number of years that one might face intense resentment from the children.

One final, essential piece of advice comes from Dr. David Pelcovitz in a talk on Maintaining Kedusha in an Overexposed Society. He quotes Victor Frankl, who said that between stimulus and response is a pause and that is where our humanity is. We have to teach our children to pause before they post. This moment for thoughtful reflection can prevent many hurtful comments and pictures. The challenge is that this pause is among the hardest things for kids to do, especially when they are middle school age. I do not know how to teach our kids to do this without moderating all their comments before they post. (By the way, parental moderation would be a great feature for Facebook to add for children aged 12-14. I know that 13 is the official age when kids are allowed to join Facebook but every child that I know started when they were 12 and "fudged" their age.)

We live in a world that puts a premium on real-time information. Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains describes how even Google has changed its algorithm to give more weight to information that is recent than to information that is important. How does one teach one's kids to pause in such a fast paced society?

4. The Positives of Social Media

I would be remiss if I did not end this review/supplement with a mention of the positives of social media. There is a reason why our children (and we, for that matter) are so drawn to social media and it is not entirely negative. Clay Shirky, in his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, describes how social media can serve as a tremendously positive force not only for keeping in touch with friends but for organizing people around a common cause. He discusses how the Internet has transformed our use of our excess free time, our "cognitive surplus," from primarily passive mediums like television to more active online communications.

I will give one example. A group of like-minded students in my school decided a few years ago that they wanted to advocate on behalf of the State of Israel, a common passion of our more politically motivated kids. Instead of phoning a few friends, they started a group which they called Students 4 Israel and created a wiki which they used to coordinate congressional letter writing campaigns, petition signings, campaigns to purchase Israeli products, and other meaningful actions on behalf of Israel. These campaigns soon involved hundreds of students in multiple schools, all writing letters or signing petitions on the same day. They recently upgraded their wiki to a full-fledged website StudentsUnite4Israel.org and now include members from over a dozen participating high schools. This type of political action and information gathering is what makes social media so attractive to and powerful for our kids. It is our job to provide them with proper supervision and guidance so they can utilize these positive aspects of social media without suffering from the common setbacks which Yeshiva University's Children in a Digital Age: Parent Guide seeks to help us avoid.

Another version of this posting appears on TorahMusings.com here: link

What do you think of Salman Khan and the "Flipped Classroom"?

2011-03-28T23:19:00.001-04:00

Two EdTech innovators that I respect, Rabbi Dov Emerson and Rabbi Michael Green, recently pointed me to the amazing TED video by Salman Khan, the visionary who created the Khan Academy as an online repository of over 2100 video tutorials on a wide range of subjects in mathematics and science. In the video, Mr. Khan describes his dream of using his videos to "flip the classroom" where instead of learning about a new topic first from a teacher using a frontal lecturing style, students can watch the videos at home. Class time could then be devoted to what would normally be "homework assignments" with students performing exercises based on the new skill while the teacher is available to assist students who need extra help or provide enrichment in the form of real-world demonstrations.

This idea of the "Flipped Classroom" actually has been around a while. You can watch a video describing a flipped science classroom below:

In the theme of the "flipped classroom", I will now "flip" this blog. Instead of my sharing with you what I think about this idea, which you as always are free to agree or disagree with, I will withhold judgement at this point. I first invite you to share your thoughts either as comments on this posting or by contacting me via Twitter, Facebook, email or any other way you would like. I will post a follow-up in the future summarizing your thoughts (if you have any) and sharing some of my own (which might have changed by that point). I welcome your feedback.