Tech Rav

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.

A Passionate, Personal Plea Concerning the Tuition Crisis

2011-03-28T22:26:00.003-04:00

I must apologize in advance for the following posting which really does not fit the style or substance of this blog. It is from someone, who I have been conversing with using social media, who is so passionate that I felt that I wanted to give him an audience. I hope that my readership will forgive me for going "off-topic". If you are only interested in educational technology, you can stop reading now. I will blog again shortly with a "sneak peak" at some ed-tech ideas that are still percolating in my mind.

The Jewish Week recently published an article about the "tuition crisis" in Yeshiva Day Schools entitled Teaneck Parents Eyeing Public (School) Option. This article raises a very alarming issue but in a way that is so one-sided that it should upset the sensibilities of anyone dedicated to Yeshiva day school education. My friend, Rabbi Aaron Ross, has blogged convincingly about the many distortions in this article in his posting: Why Does the Jewish Week not Support Day Schools?.

When I first saw this article, I responded vociferously to it using social media. I expressed my dismay that these people are ignoring the simple fact, which has been proven over and over again in numerous studies in the social sciences in the last two decades, that the best defense against assimilation and intermarriage is a Yeshiva education. See for example the following summary of studies on this topic: http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/WillYourGrandchildrenBeJews/.

Then I was contacted by someone who argued that I was being insensitive by judging others who were in this situation. I struck up a conversation with him and he write me a lengthy response which appears below, with the writer's permission. The only edits I have made have been a few minor grammatical changes and the removing of any personal identifiers from this posting so that the writer could remain anonymous. It is my hope that this plea and other similar stories will help mobilize to the Jewish community to try to find new ways to deal with this crisis.

Thanks for your responses as well, I did read the article you sent via link. First, I think the problem is we are arguing 2 different points. I believe with every fiber of my being in the value both short term and long of a yeshiva education. Period. The problem is affordability. There are those who use the cost of tuition as a ruse for not sending their children and using money for materialistic pleasures. I am not speaking about nor defending that category. There are however those that TRULY want to send kids to yeshiva but DO NOT have the gelt.

In my case, we had one income but couldn't afford it so my wife went to work at a job she absolutely hates and was miserable but she did it. Even with 2 incomes, we had 3 tuitions and every year the tuitions went up. It became impossible to meet financial responsibilities let alone save anything. We, unfortunately, had no choice and ended up putting one daughter in (Public) H.S.

Let me tell you, I dropped my daughter off there on first day. As she got out of the car and walked towards school, it was one or probably the worst day of my life. It was slow motion, surreal, horrible. I wish that day on no one, a million emotions, what helplessness I felt. If there were any way to have sent to yeshiva, I would have. Then, not speaking of you specifically, those more financially endowed pass judgements and criticisms, make the situation more painful. I can assure you that to this day I am not "vacationing" nor living in the Lap of luxury.

I worry every day about the statistics you sent. I can only say we tried our best and hope for the best but we can only do what we can do There is a crisis here. What is the Jewish community doing to help besides talking, discussing and arguing about it? At the risk of spending others money, I would say instead of donating a million dollars to have your name put on a shul, donate that money to a yeshiva for scholarship money. I know shuls need money too, but if our children fall off the path, we won't need shuls any more.

From the pages of Jewish Action: Technology in the Classroom

2011-03-22T22:44:00.005-04:00

Below is my article from the Spring 2011 edition of Jewish Action. You can read the entire article here. I would like to thank Rabbi Gil Student who recommended me for this article. I welcome your feedback.

Technology in the Classroom

Teachers often bemoan the fact that students who have been in yeshivah their entire lives often have difficulty deciphering a pasuk in Chumash. However, while all teachers agree that Hebrew reading skills are important, they rarely devote significant class time—especially in high school—to this important skill. The reason is simple. Teaching reading is boring and time-consuming. In the traditional yeshivah environment, where many hours are devoted to chavruta-style learning, perfecting reading skills in the majority of students may be an achievable goal. However, in a typical Jewish day school where classroom instruction is divided into forty-minute periods, teachers cannot spend time calling upon multiple readers without tuning out the rest of the class.

Enter Voicethread. Voicethread is a free web-based application that allows one to record himself without using any special software. The teacher can post a piece of text and assign students to read it for homework. The student then logs in and, using a computer and a microphone (virtually every laptop today comes with a built-in microphone), the student reads the text back to the teacher. The teacher can then grade each student individually on his or her reading, even on a nightly basis, without taking a moment of class time.

What’s a Wiki?

Wiki is another great example of how web technology can be used in the classroom. Hawaiian for quick, wiki lives up to its name as a fast and easy way to create web sites that allow users to add and update content. The most famous example of a wiki is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia collaboratively created by thousands of volunteer contributors. At The Frisch School, where I serve as the director of educational technology, we use Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com) to create wikis for each grade level focused around a common theme. The goal is to tear down the classroom walls by fostering collaboration between different classes. Pages are edited by multiple teachers who post content from various classes related to the particular theme.

Such online discussions are more than just homework assignments; they are valuable forums for students to flesh out their ideas about religion and life.

Therefore, a typical page can have material posted from Chumash, Navi, English and science classes.
Students interact with the wiki primarily through discussion forums included on each page. These forums promote student reflection, participation, and interaction. In a typical classroom discussion, students have little time to reflect. Many thoughtful students who require more time to process information are sometimes left out of classroom discussions. In an online discussion, however, students can think over a question before composing a carefully crafted response. Some of the most profound responses have come from students who rarely speak up in class. Such online discussions are more than just homework assignments; they are valuable forums for students to flesh out their ideas about religion and life in a safe educational setting.

Continue here: link

Does the Internet make us shallower? Initial thoughts on The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

2011-03-22T00:15:00.004-04:00

I just finished reading The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr. In this book, the author argues that while the Internet has given us a greater breadth of knowledge it has come at the expense of intellectual depth. Here are my initial thoughts.

The book is a fascinating read combining a survey of the history of the development of written language with cognitive psychology and interspersed with the author's enlightening editorial asides. The author cites a great deal of evidence that the brain is "plastic" and can therefore be rewired throughout one's lifetime based on how it's used. He believes that each successive advancement in written language has led to a rewiring of the brain. Carr recounts this development starting with the oral traditions of the bard and continuing with the first chiseled words on cuneiform tablets, the creation of writing surfaces like papyrus and animal hides, the invention of the phonetic alphabet, the first books known as the codex, and finally to the advent of the Gutenberg Printing Press which democratized the book as a medium for the masses.

In each of these instances, Carr argues that the brain went through a fundamental change. For example, the invention of the phonetic alphabet eased the process of reading and writing since it taxed the brain far less than the earlier cuneiform symbols. This led to the shift from a primarily oral culture to a written culture. Later, the printing press with the standard alphabet, punctuation, and spacing between words further increased reading comprehension so the reader could spend more time focusing deeply on the content of the written text. The ability for quiet contemplation which reading provided led to great advances in human consciousness and scientific thinking.

According to the author, this is threatened by the rise of the Internet. The author believes that the Internet discourages deep thinking and analysis by encouraging the opposite form of inquiry, broad skimming of various areas of knowledge. The primary cause of this is the hyperlink, the footnotes embedded within webpages, that serves as a launching pad to various other sites. When one is reading online, one rarely spends too much time on one page and, even when looking at a single webpage, often skims the text rather than reading it with the care of a printed book. The hyperlinks and other stimuli on the page distract the eye. Jumping to another site, even for a few moments, in the midst of reading further causes one to lose one's train of thought. When returning to the original site, the reader has to refocus himself and these extra steps mitigate against deep thought. When this web-based reading is accompanied by multi-tasking, as is common amongst our students who read various websites while simultaneously IMing or texting friends, and updating their Facebook status updates, this further exacerbates the difficulty in achieving anything more than a superficial understanding of the text. The author cites a great deal of research to support each of these statements based on cognitive overload theory and other areas that are beyond the scope of this posting.

The author has an entire chapter devoted to Google that is particularly illuminating. Google claims to have as its mission statement: "to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful." While accessibility, organization, and usefulness appear to be lofty goals, in reality, Google also has some other unstated agendas. The author explains how Google primarily makes its money through the placement of ads that are coupled with each search screen. Therefore, Google profits more when people do a superficial reading of websites and then quickly return to the search screen. The more Google searches, the more profit. Even the Google Books Project which seeks to digitize the world's libraries so it is freely available to the masses (what goal could be loftier than that?) has an insidious side effect. Using text searching in books, encourages one to cull bits and pieces of information from books from a page or two rather than reading the chapter or book in its original context. Once again, the book merely becomes another information source that Google can profit from rather than a tool for contemplation and deep thinking.

The author ends as he began on a cautionary note, stating that by using computers to mediate our understanding of the world, rather than teaching computers to become more human, we are actually training ourselves to become more like an artificial intelligence and gradually becoming devoid of what makes us human.

While I agree that Carr's caution is well founded and noteworthy, I believe that it is a bit unrealistic and overblown. The author creates a false dichotomy between exclusively using printed works which encourages deep thinking and the use of the Internet which rewires the brain against contemplation. What real solution does this provide for the issues that are raised? The author describes how in writing this book he moved from the hubbub of the city to the quiet solitude of a cabin in Colorado and greatly curtailed his use of the Internet and other technologies. This is a highly unrealistic prescription for most of us as the author himself admits.

Even in the Haredi Jewish world where the Internet is often discouraged such decrees against technology often lead to significant backlash. I remember a talk about technology and teenagers given by Rav Yanky Horowitz who is path-breaking, open-minded Haredi educator. When a parent asked him what he should do if his child wants to join Facebook, Rav Horowitz's response was to join Facebook yourself and "friend" your son or daughter. Rav Horowitz noted that if your child wants to join Facebook then s/he will find a way to do it no matter what. However, if you forbid Facebook then this will be a surreptitious act in which the child will likely not use caution or foresight in his/her online interactions. If you allow your child to join Facebook when s/he first expresses a desire to do so early in the teenage years, your child will appreciate you and much more readily accept your influence. I found this illuminating response to be the only realistic response to technology. Not to ban it or decry it's use, but to accept it, set boundaries for it's use, and provide guidance when necessary.

With this in mind, here are a few of my suggestions in how to deal with some of issues Carr raises.

Encourage the use of technology tools to help alleviate the very problems that Carr discusses. Carr notes convincingly that a many hyperlinks, pop-up ads or other distractions on a page can negatively effect reading comprehension and retention. One tool that I have found to be indispensable in combatting this is Readability. This is a free app that gives any web-page the clean appearance of ereaders like the Kindle so one can focus one's attention on the page and not the distractions. I recommend encouraging the use of this tool for your student or child.
Discourage multi-tasking. Although Carr notes that research indicates that kids today are in fact better multi-taskers than in the past, the cost in terms of distractibility and lack of clear and deep thought is immense. When doing homework on the computer, require kids to put away the cell phone, keep IMing to a minimum, and regulate how much time can be devoted to social networking sites. This is a hard one to require but I heard a suggestion from Dr. David Pelcovitz to help educate one's child. Have them do an experiment where one night they do homework the way they normally do and the following night they do the same amount of homework while minimizing multi-tasking. They should then compare the amount of time it takes them to do their homework on each night. They will probably discover on their own the time savings achieved when focusing on one task at a time. If they do not see a difference then perhaps they are not that distracted by their other activities.
Encourage the positive uses of technology. One area where I have personally experienced the advantages of technology is in encouraging time for reflection. This posting is one example. The ability to read an article or book and then blog about it greatly improves my thinking. Often students as well can better express their ideas through typing on a computer than by writing with pen and paper. The social nature of online self expression also encourages reflection. I have used this to great effect with my students through the use of online discussion forums. I have found student responses online to often be richer and more thoughtful than their responses in class or their writings on more formal written assignments.
Shabbos. In Judaism, we are lucky. God has mandated for us, one day a week to refresh our minds and replenish our soul without the distractions of the modern technological world. It's called Shabbos. I often get my best creative work done on Motzi Shabbat because my "wired" brain has had a day to rest. Impress these benefits on your children/students. Perhaps rather than view Shabbos as a chore, a series of "don'ts", or a day when they secretly text when you are not looking, they will learn to appreciate the beauty and power of the day as a welcome break from the constant need to be "online" in our technological world.

Teaching the Hidden Message of Esther

2011-03-18T09:24:00.000-04:00

In honor of Purim, I am posting a PowerPoint presentation that I created based on the shiur by Rav Menachem Leibtag, Megillat Esther and its Hidden Message.

I used iSpring, a free PowerPoint add-on, to convert my presentation to a Flash file and upload it onto Slideboom so I could embed it into my blog with all the animations exactly as it would play in PowerPoint. I hope that this presentation illustrates how the visuals, text, and animations can enhance the understanding of an idea without making the common PowerPoint mistakes that I have blogged about in the past in my posting on Creating Effective PowerPoint Presentations and on Technology Presentations on Jewish Web 2.0 and Educationally Effective Presentations.

Megillas Esther: The Hidden Message

View more presentations or Upload your own.

When I showed this presentation to Rav Menachem Leibtag he expressed a dream that a website could be created for teachers to collaborate on multi-media curricular materials such as PowerPoint and Smart Notebook presentations based on his shiurim and others. I would think this could be done with a wiki and/or Google Docs model where teachers could post curricular materials for others to add onto or even create curriculum collaboratively. This would obviously require a great many teachers to devote their time to this and funding to make this happen. Does anyone want to help me get this started?

I'm in the movies (and you can be too)!!!

2011-03-17T13:27:00.004-04:00

I just finished watching myself and some of my fellow Lookjeders depicted as cartoon characters arguing over Applying Literary analysis in Tanach. You might remember that I previously blogged my response to this question which I then posted on Lookjed, the online forum for Jewish Day School educators.

Lookjed chose a hilariously clever way to spoof this and other Lookjed discussions by transforming these conversations into cartoons. They used a free web-based application called Xtranormal which allows you to make movies by converting your text to speech. You just choose a setting complete with cartoon characters, different scene, and sounds from sixteen different templates, enter the text for each each character to speak, and publish your movie.

You can read the 5771 Purim Lookjed with links to all their cartoon videos here. I have embedded the video in which I am one of the "stars" below.

Educational applications
Obviously, this can be a great tool to share with students for creating multi-media projects. Xtranormal even offers an educational section for this purpose. Below are a few examples.

Watch a project on the Book of Amos created by two of my students here.
Here is a video invite created by my school, The Frisch School, for our annual dinner. You can view more Xtranormal videos created by The Frisch School on http://frischdinner.com/.

Give it a try and soon you and your students will be in the movies!!!