All Blog Posts (868)

I’m sorry its been a while since my last post but I’ve been quite busy with my first year of grad school for a masters in Jewish education. Each day I attended class enjoying lectures on a variety of topics I was amazed how the field of EdTech was inextricably connected to the dialogue of education. In every class, every day, without fail, the topic of technology in the classroom creeped into the conversation. I started to wonder if this was a phenomena I was experiencing alone, perhaps…

There is more than one way to teach a lesson.  Even if it’s the most basic lesson.  No two people learn in the identical way.  What may be a successful learning environment for one person, may impair another's learning.

Although the essential curricula goals and objectives may be similar for the learners, methodologies employed must be…

Check out http://reformsymposium.com/ and the hashtag #RSCON3 - its a live Edu/EdTech conference with tons of excellent presenters going on all weekend (today through Sunday), free.

It uses the Elluminate (webinar) platform. Very cool!

There are so many advantages in using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, including the creating of a community of learners in your classroom, in which the learning is not just focused on individuals, but rather on the whole class growing together, and one of the other advantages being the low cost. Evernote is one of the 2.0 tools that bring these advantages to your classroom.

Evernote is an online organizational tool that allows you to clip text, images, audio, and PDF files from the…

Did you ever have one of those days where things seemed to be making sense (at least academically) all day long? Today was one of those days for me. As part of YU’s EdTech certificate program that I am participating in, I was assigned the task of staying current with the ISTE conference either by being there live, or by watching the conference via video on demand. For those who are not yet familiar with ISTE, it stands for International Society for Technology in Education and is designed for…

When our school started pushing 21^st century skills, and when I signed up for the YU EdTech certificate program, it was made very clear that technology is not the end result, it’s just a tool to help us get there. Throughout these courses we have been exposed to and had “shimush” with so many different tools, and that was amazing. I have gained so much knowledge, and my 21^st century appetite has been growing too. However, this week, when the assignment called for us…

Do you ever go to a simcha and watch how some people just gravitate towards the band, as if that’s the main event? How about after a good lecture where there are those who just stay there until the guest lecturer actually drives away, without even saying anything to him? In both of these scenarios, I would be the one that I described. For me, it’s (at least according to my wife) not about a psychological problem that I may have, it’s all about the talent that I am so impressed with. When…

I am not sure if now is the right time of the year to use the following saying, but there is a saying that says “when in Rome do as the Roman’s do”. Social networks are here, and they aren’t going away so fast. So as Jewish educators, how do we educate our students that everything has a purpose and a value? We show them how everything can be used for good too by having them use it for a good purpose. In order to turn this into a reality, I created a group in edmodo called JH Parsha (The code…

Isn’t it funny how busy we all are? One might think that with the invention of machines and technology, that we would have so much more time than the people of the earlier generations. But truth be told, we are busier now than we were ever before. These same inventions that were supposed to simplify our lives have somehow managed to add a different sort of craziness to our lives. That is where productivity tools come in. They are supposed to be the Excalibur of our generation. These tools…

I am really excited about discovering podcasts and how to create one, but I am really excited about actually using them for my classes next year. In the podcast I created I spoke about the concern that I had when students who were showing a great grasp on the subject matter while in class would be the very same ones who couldn’t perform well on a simple assessment the very next day in class. A great, easy, and free tool to use is a podcast. With a podcast, a teacher can record himself…

I have a found a new love!  My husband knows about it and understands it is strictly an online affair.  I have shown him my new interest and not surprisingly, he fell in love too!  We are now both carrying on an affair.  We have fallen in love… with Jing!

            Jing is a visual tool that allows the user to record her voice as well as what is on the screen.  You can use Jing to demonstrate how to navigate a website or even show how to complete a multi-step math problem.  What…

Call me old school, but I am very cautious about giving out personal information over the internet. After reading chapter 10 in a book called “Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use”, I was all the more reminded of just how careful we have to be while cruising down the internet. I remember during our in-service this year, when we had to type in our cell phone number to activate one of the online tools, how I used my friends number because I was too scared to give my own number.…

I just learned about Google Forms. You can create your own forms or surveys and have all the information immediately downloaded into a spreadsheet in Google Docs. I have had some experience with Survey Monkey. I like this even better. For one thing, it’s free. Second it is simple and easily editable. Once you create a survey you can email it out anyone you wish.…

Research.  In the days of yore, we would go to the library and spend countless hours among the stacks of resource materials.  We would spend obscene amounts of money and waste reams of paper on photocopies.  Then we would attempt to decipher all of the collected data into something that actually made sense only to realize that we were still missing some key information.  And then, along came the Internet and completely changed the game.

         The students of today no longer need to…

My religious school  5^th grade teacher and I met the other day.  We are exploring how to revamp our t’filla curriculum using digital technology.  There are a lot of cool tools out there. Our challenge is to find one that appropriately meets our goals.  We want our students to be able to decode t’fillot fluently and to understand what they are all about – to be able to articulate what the kavannah is in their own words. When we looked at…