One of my highlights was my ability to interact, reflect, and network with a smaller group of Jewish educators at what was then known as the Jewish Educators Birds of a Feather, a meetup at the conference. Sharing with like-minded educators in Jewish day schools and supplementary schools allowed for the important process of translating and transforming the various tools, teaching strategies, and technology innovations from the conference to the unique environment in our Jewish schools.
As the years went on, I became more involved in this Birds of a Feather group, helping them form a wiki together with Caren Levine in 2012. Later when ISTE retired their “Birds of a Feather” format, I reached out to them to continue this important gathering at the conference. I left like the farmer who responded to Honi in the famous story about the carob tree, “Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.” This group had such a formative effect on my growth in the world of Jewish EdTech and I wanted to ensure that this continued for others into the future. You can read my summary of last year’s Jewish Educators Network meetup here.
For this year’s meetup, the planning committee which consisted of myself, Michael Cohen, Seth Dimbert, Stew Greenberg, and Benny Gross, wanted to give Jewish educators the opportunity to present to the group as well as have ample time for follow-up discussion, and give away and raffle off some serious swag.
We made a call for presentations, received many worthy respondents, and came up with the following program of 5-minute Ignite Style presentations by:
- Josh Bierman on System Security in Jewish Day Schools
- Binyomin Segal on Setting School-wide Technology Goals
- Debbie Harris on The SSDS innovation Studio: What We Learned in Year One
- Michael Voskoboynik on Using Technology to Ensure the Legacy of the Shoah
- Michael Cohen and Moshe Azizollahoff on New Developments in The Mercava
- Ben Forta an observant Jew who is the Senior Director of Education Initiatives at Adobe Edu about his experience at Adobe.
- Gary Hartstein of the Jewish Education Project, a sponsor of the event, about the new Tech for Learning Initiative
The presentations were recorded for Facebook Live.
Here are some pictures of the follow-up discussion groups (and the swag).
Olivia Friedman took wonderful notes of the event that she shared on the #ISTE2017 crowdsourced notes spreadsheet.
And Debbie Harris created beautiful sketchnotes.
I don’t have much to add to Olivia and Debbie’s thorough notes but here are some general reflections together with slides from each presentation.
Josh Bierman’s presentation on security reminded us of best practices in online security. His focus was on how one does not need to be “Fort Knox” but one needs to be a bit more secure than the next guy so the hackers will not choose you as an easy target. Passwords are better if they are long sentences than the typical passphrase with special characters, numbers, and letters that is easily forgotten. One should have different passwords for every site (something almost none of us do) so one should use a password vault and utilize two-factor identification where one enters a password and then enters a code or does some other action using one’s phone. This presentation contained very useful information which all of us should aspire to follow.
Binyomin Segal’s presentation on Setting School-wide Technology Goals reminded me of the importance of creating a technology committee consisting of the various stakeholders in a school, teachers, administrators, and students to think carefully about why one should integrate educational technology, how to manage this, and to continuously update and improve. Too often schools do not clearly state a vision and goals for technology integration or do not plan for how to go about reaching these goals. I feel that this should be a continuous process as goals are set, assessed and then further tweaked to meet the one overarching goal which should always be to improve the learning of our students.
What fascinated me about Debbie Harris’ presentation on Innovation Studio: Year One Lessons Learned was how she was willing to share not only her successes but her failures as well. The key to any creative undertaking is the willingness to take risks, fail, and then learn from those mistakes for future growth. Too often in our hyper competitive school environment, our high achieving students resist failure at any cost.
I remember a Lookjed discussion many years ago dealing with the sins of our Avot and Imahot in the Torah. The message that I believe firmly the Torah sends is that in order to achieve greatness one must, at times, fail.
This is also a lesson gleaned from our start-up technology world. The people who create products that transform the world go through many iterations. Often they fail many times. Just think of Steve Jobs who was forced out of Apple, rightfully so, only to return years later and create the iPhone.
Debbie applies this Maker Mindset to how she describes her makerspace. This modeling by teachers I believe is a key to how we communicate the real process of learning and creating to our students.
Michael Voskoboynik’s presentation about Using Technology to Ensure the Legacy of the Shoah which he gave together with his wonderful students who led a poster session and also attended the meetup has a dear place in my heart. He described how his students interviewed their older relatives using text, audio, and video and then researched where they came from with tools like augmented reality, google slides and maps, and timeline makers like tiki-toki to name a few. Personally, I have been privileged to record interviews with a number of my relatives from the greatest generation, some of whom have since passed. The process of recording them, transcribing these recordings, and saving them for posterity is a precious one for me. I think Michael has done a tremendous service for his middle school students as they will look back many years from now and greatly value the legacy of their grandparents and other relatives which they have carefully collected, curated, and shared.
After the four presentations, Michael Cohen and Moshe Azizollahoff described the vision of the new and improved Mercava platform. You might remember that a few years back, the Mercava made a big splash with their promise of a carefully curated online platform of Jewish textual tools. Many were quite excited about this including myself. But then The Mercava went silent as the fundraising process hit some bumps along the way. The Mercava is back with a new suite of exciting tools which you can view here. These tools offer a site for teachers and students to markup, record, and discuss beautifully formatted Jewish text.
Some at the conference were already asking what distinguishes this from the highly successful Sefaria which many of us, including myself, utilize in our classes on a daily basis. I believe the difference between Sefaria and Mercava is much like the difference between Google and Apple. Google has been iterating for years a very powerful collaborative suite of apps which are now a vital part of virtually every classroom in the world. Apple meanwhile has focused on the user experience. Their devices and apps are beautiful and intuitive for anyone.
I believe that Sefaria has already become the “Google” of the Jewish learning world. Its ever increasing library of open source text and its growing array of tools to manipulate this text is indispensable in the Jewish classroom. I hope that the Mercava will become the “Apple” of the Jewish world, focusing on the user experience so any teacher and student can have a one stop shop to learn with the tzurat hadaf, creating markup, audio and video of these seforim, and be involved in both real-time and asynchronous discussion around the text. If this vision can finally be achieved, then the world Torah learning will greatly benefit from both Sefaria and the Mercava.
Ben Forta then described his years at Adobe education. He spoke of Adobe’s vision to help students create. He expressed the promise and frustration of the current state of technology for children who have, “vast processing powers in their pockets and mostly use it catch Pokemon or send funny faces to their friends.” Our school has greatly benefited from Adobe’s new education licensing for Creative Cloud which allows us to legally deploy apps like Photoshop and Illustrator onto student owned devices. And for students who wish to create but are not (yet) tech savvy enough to use a professional level tool like Photoshop, Adobe Spark is fast becoming the go-to tool for easy content creation.
Gary Hartstein from the Jewish Education Project, who generously sponsored our event for the second year in a row, ended with an announcement about the new Tech for Learning Initiative which allows teacher teams from the NY/NJ area to learn about edtech integration in an intensive summer institute followed by coaching during the school year and use that knowledge to write up a micro-grant to implement a project in one’s school. This sounds like a promising venture which I am sure we will be hearing more about in the future.
The Jewish Educators Network Meetup at ISTE was an exciting event which helped me and others learn further from our fellow Jewish educators. I am excited to see what further collaborations will stem from this gathering. I look forward to planning future sharing opportunities this year and attending the next Jednetwork meetup next year in Jerusalem (or if it is not yet in Jerusalem, to take place as scheduled at ISTE 2018 in Chicago).
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