Links You’ll Love
Mission US is an interactive adventure game designed to improve the understanding of American history by students in grades 5 through 8. This multimedia project includes student activities, an educator’s guide, and additional media sources.
Need copyright free images? Do your students need copyright free images? As educators, we really should encourage our students to use them – not every image found on the Internet is there for the using! Check out PhotoPin – it searches photos on Flickr with the Creative Commons designation (something the 8th graders know all about from searching for photos for their book trailers).
Links You’ll Love
Dr. Danah Boyd talks about her work studying teenagers and their online activity at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/fashion/danah-boyd-cracking-teenagers-online-codes.html. Dr. Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft, an assistant professor at New York University and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. It’s fascinating stuff.
I know you’ve spent hours thinking about these questions:
- How will the evolving nature of belonging, membership, and affiliation influence Jewish communities of the future?
- How will Jewish life and learning be impacted as we move into an increasingly networked world?
Why don’t you make a four-minute video with your thoughts and submit it to the Jewish Futures Competition? Check out http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e5h3m2v44611a3f1&llr=hvaohecab for more information.
Anybody using Twitter? No? Well, you need to get yourself over there and check out the cool stuff our math classes are tweeting! One group is tweeting as math concepts and the other as famous mathematicians. What a great project! Using the hashtag #sssmsmath, they’re posting such nuggets (all in 140 characters or less) as:
(Charles Babbage) “created a calculator without human error, what have you done?”
(Planes2D) “Someone told me my wardrobe was limited. Little do they know, everything of mine goes on forever.”
(RtTriangle1) “Someone just said I’m kind of square, but I am cool! Right?”
Want to check out the math tweets? Go to https://twitter.com/#!/search-home and put in #sssmsmath.
Links You’ll Love – January 20, 2012
Boxing in Berlin, young Leonard Bernstein and Hank Greenberg… The 2012 Sidney Taylor Book Awards have been announced – check them out here.
You all know what a Google doodle is, right? It’s when Google turns their logo into a graphic in commemoration of something. I know you know some kids who would love to have their doodle on Google! Here’s where they can find out how their idea could end up a Google Doodle. The theme is “If I could travel in time, I’d visit…” and the winner gets a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for their school.
You may have visited Wikipedia on Wednesday and, well, not been able to get any info. Or noticed that Google had those strange blackout boxes on it. This was all in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. While those venerable sites are all for stopping online piracy, many Internet companies feel the act is too restrictive and would ultimately be an affront to our freedom. Here are several resources about the issue:
http://www.good.is/post/what-would-a-post-sopa-internet-look-like/
There has been for some time a cyber war between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hacking groups, the latest of which occurred Wednesday as “Israeli hackers unveiled details of approximately 4,800 credit cards from various accounts held in Saudi Arabia.” Read the rest of the story here.
Links You’ll Love – January 6, 2012
Here’s a lovely blog post on doing lunch duty. Much of it goes for any kind of non-classroom situation like recess duty or supervising students on field trips.
Do you or your students use EasyBib for bibliographies? Did you know they have apps for the iPhone and Android phones? Creating a citation couldn’t be easier: just scan the bar code and it creates a citation.
Admongo.gov is a website designed to teach kids about advertising. Students participate in activities geared to answer questions like: Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do?
One of my favorite education authors is Will Richardson. He has a new thought piece on District Administrator: Are you an old school or a bold school? Worth a read.
Here’s another website designed for teachers who rely on YouTube videos and want to present them in a safe environment.
I know you’ve all had that secret desire to learn how to code (as in programming for computers). No? Maybe you have a student or two who would like to… Check out codeacademy to get an idea of how learning to code can be fun. Really!
Links You’ll Love for 12-02-11
The folks who bring us the TED Talks – those awesome, usually pretty short inspirational and educational talks I love so much – are counting down to 2012 in an unusual way. Teaming with the Huffington Post, TED is bringing us the 18 ideas (I wonder why it’s 18…) that they think will shape 2012. Ideas! Essays! World changing big thinking! The first entry is “How Algorithms Shape Our World.” Can it get much better? These videos and accompanying essays will be posted here.
Easybib, that venerable website that makes learning how to create bibliographies virtually obsolete, also has a student portal that includes writing and research guides, as well as extensive resources on citations. There is also a teachers’ portal with info on avoiding plagiarism and a signup for their educator newsletter.
Whatcha doin’ February 19th? Consider spending the day learning Jewish stuff at Limmud Chicago. And if you’re interested in a teensy taste of Limmud, come to the Chicago Board of Jewish Education next Sunday (December 11th) from 7:00 until 9:00 pm. I’m excited to be presenting that evening. Visit their website for more information and to register for Chicago Limmud.
Wanna rock out? Check out Jewish Rock Radio. This non-for-profit website endeavors to instill Jewish identity in Jewish youth and young adults through the power of music.
And…more Hanukkah preparation: groove to the little boy strumming the ukulele at the beginning of The Yeshiva Boys Choir doing “Those Were the Nights (of Chanukah):
and boogie down to Candlelight by the Maccabeats:
And lest we forget the venerable source of all things latke, don’t miss The Potato Song:
I apologize in advance for getting the tune stuck in your head.
Links You’ll Love 11-18-11
Jewish? Reader? Well, then, you’re in luck! The Jewish Book Council has a nifty new website. “Promoting the reading, writing, publication, distribution, and public awareness of books that reflect the breadth of the Jewish experience.” You have to love that the blog is called the ProsenPeople.
Explore the land of the ancient Pharoahs at this PBS.org site. Witness an actual mummy preparation session and more. This site includes videos, 360° imagery (yes! You can walk AROUND a pyramid!) and my personal favorite, 10 ways to make a mymmy.
The Leo Baeck Institute, “a research library and archive that contains the most significant collection of source material relating to the history of German-speaking Jewry,” is working to make its materials available online. Search their database here.
Salman Khan of Khan Academy has turned the academic world on its head with his ideas about how to transform education. I featured his TED Talk last year – here it is if you missed it the first time:
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Links You’ll Love for 11-11-11
If you use YouTube videos in the classroom, you may want to check out Dragontape. Dragontape (which is drag-on-tape, not something that breathes fire…) allows you to essentially create your own YouTube mix tapes, combining bits and pieces of existing YouTube videos. This would be ideal for the times you want to show your classes a few minutes of a few different videos. A similar tool can be found at Veengle.
I’m a big believer in gaming in education. Here’s a fascinating article on how scientific discovery can benefit from gamers.
Consider asking questions. Here’s what happens when a sixth grader asks “How do you make an iPhone app?”
Do you celebrate questions in your class or do you just celebrate answers? Here’s an interesting blog post on the subject.
Chanukah is coming! Well, it’s not exactly around the corner yet, but it is out there. Jacob Richman has put together a nice video with 15 Chanukah-related Hebrew phrases.
Do you encourage inspiration? Want to learn more about inspiration and how to cultivate it? This blog post from the Harvard Business Review states, “…as recent research shows, inspiration can be activated, captured, and manipulated, and it has a major effect on important life outcomes.”
And one more from the HBR Blog about whether or not praise leads to cheating. While this is written for business organizations, I think there’s much we can gain from it about how to change mindset.
Links You’ll Love 11-4-11
Ever wonder about Jewish creativity? David Brooks believes it’s “our own experience of our minority culture clashing with whatever majority culture we’re living in—whether Christian or something else.” Brooks asked some very creative people for their thoughts for this article for Moment magazine.
Wikipedia…love it? Hate it? Scared of it? Haifa University is incorporating writing for Wikipedia in a pilot program where 20 university lecturers and their students will be contributing entries to the Hebrew Wikipedia to fulfill course requirements. Read more about it here.
Thinking about getting started with Twitter? Here’s a great way to begin. Every Wednesday night there’s a Twitter chat going on, using the hashtag #jedchat. Get yourself a Twitter account, log in at 8:00 pm on Wednesdays, search for #jedchat, and talk about Jewish education with educators from around the world. For a great resource on getting started with Twitter, check this out.
Designing a Digital Quest…
Update on learning how to design a digital quest:
I introduced my religious school students to arisgames.org last week. I broke out the laptops and had the kids go to my Interesting Questing wiki page. They watched some movies about using ARIS and SCVNGR and about Global Kids’ NY Haunts game. They are EXCITED!
After getting them excited about the project we played Grow a Game (thank you Natalie from the iCenter for introducing us to this!). I wanted to get their creative juices flowing.
Then we talked about what kind of quests we could send Jewish teenagers on. My students offered ideas like “teach about Judaism to someone who doesn’t know about it,” and “wear a kippah for a day and journal about what happens.” They had some great questions too, like “can we link this to Facebook?” (great idea!)
Then I started spending some time playing with ARIS. The editor is still under construction, and the creators warn you that the interface is shaky, but I haven’t had any problems in my limited testing. The biggest issue for me is that support materials are rather scarce: I like to work through tutorials and read manuals and those just don’t exist. But that’s part of the fun of using emerging technology, right?
I’m totally psyched about using ARIS for this project. I love that you can drop items anywhere using the map interface, so we can create the game from the comfort of our classroom and then just go into the field to test it. Once I understood the basic interface I found creating quests and characters fairly intuitive. I still need to master the terminology and how to logically create quests, and of course, how the game flows will be a big challenge. But I definitely see this having tremendous potential!
Next steps:
1. Design a few quests that kids can experience in the synagogue so they get the idea
2. Create a plan for designing a game flow
3. Design classroom dynamics. There are close to twenty kids who come regularly. How do we split these kids up so everyone’s engaged and productive?
Big questions: what are the educational goals for the activity? How do you blend “experiential education” with mobile devices?
To be continued!
Links You’ll Love
Want to brainstorm with your class? Check out Edistrom and sign up for a free educator’s account. Here’s a video explaining how to use it.
Attention math teachers! Visit ThatQuiz for activities that reinforce math concepts. Students get immediate feedback! Educators can create accounts and assign or create your own tests. For more math resources, here’s a great blog post with a list of math videos on YouTube.
I know I’ve told you about ways to send audio emails using Vocaroo before. Want to send (or have your students send) a video email? Two resources are MailVu and Eyejot. Mailvu and Eyejot require users to sign up (a pet peeve of mine), but I know it’s good to give your students several options if you’re assigning homework.
About
Debbie Harris is the technology coordinator at the Sager Solomon Schechter Middle School in Northbrook, IL and teaches religious school at Lakeside Congregation for Reform Judaism. Involved in Jewish education for over thirty years, she received an education degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in instructional media. She is skilled in using and teaching desktop publishing, video editing, presentation and animation software; and consults and presents regularly on integrating technology into Judaic studies. Her students podcast, blog, edit video and create claymations. She co-chaired the technology track for CAJE 33 in Vermont, is a SMART Certified Trainer for SMART Notebook version 10 for both Macintosh and Windows, and a 2011 recipient of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
When not learning, teaching or writing about technology, Debbie likes to craft. While not particularly highly skilled at anything, she likes to knit, do calligraphy, sew, paint fabric and just generally play with fun toys like scrapbooking supplies, watercolors, and anything with texture. She is incredibly proud of her two daughters; Lori, who teaches English at a community college; and Allie, who is a student at Hebrew Union College in LA.
Look for her at:
Her educational technology wiki
Debbie Does Desktop
Flickr
Twitter
Diigo
YouTube
Ravelry
Email Debbie here
