A few weeks ago, as I waited for the Chuppah ceremony to begin at a wedding of a dear family member, I took out my smartphone. The wedding was in an area where I had poor cell phone service, so my "yetzer hara" to check my Facebook, Twitter, or other social media accounts was minimal. Rather, I opened my favorite Torah app,
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference is less than three weeks away and I need your help. Together with Sue Waters from Edublogs, I will be leading a BYOD* session on Crowdsourcing ISTE: A Dynamic Model for Collaboration Inside and Outside the Classroom. (Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions... Read more »
I first fell in love with Gemara Berura a dozen years ago. I had just finished my most ambitious project-based learning assignment I had ever attempted with my 9th grade class. We designed a “How To Learn Gemara” website. In this project, my students culminated a year of a careful skills-based approach to learning Gemara by summarizing the various Sugiyot they had learned complete with keywords and color coding. They
For centuries, the primary method of learning in the Beit Midrash has been chavruta, cooperative learning, followed by shiur, whole classroom discussion and discourse. I fondly remember my years learning in Israel and then in rabbinical school where my rebbe would start by giving us a list of maarei mekomot, sources to
Last week, I had the privilege of joining our engineering classes on a trip to Google. Wow! As my students pointed out, it was like a modern day Willie Wonka with game rooms, lego, scooters, funky furniture everywhere, and three free scrumptious meals a day