Etgar means “challenge” in Hebrew, and that’s precisely what Etgar 36 students experience as they explore the continental United States on a 36-day summer trip. By stopping at locations like the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and Washington DC’s Capitol, over the course of their journey, teen participants meet and talk with people all over the social and political spectrum, including NRA and Tea Party members, gay rights activists and black and Jewish civil rights leaders. During the academic year,
For Billy Planer, founder and director of Etgar 36, “Etgar” also identifies a challenge to educating teens in the historical legacy of American Jews, and light the fire of their political passions and Jewish identity. In order to perform the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to repair the world, Planer believes Jewish teenagers need to learn more about history.
Planer’s goal is to create an informed, engaged and invested Jewish teen population who will grow to become dynamic, involved citizens. The diverse range of viewpoints represented underscores the idea that the emphasis of the Etgar 36 trip is not on teaching any one ‘party line,’ but rather on sowing seeds of future social discourse and political engagement through interaction. Since the program started, Planer said, more than 15,000 people have traveled with Etgar 36.
The first Etgar 36 trip left in 2003; Planer later explained on Facebook, “It has been my hope to educate and inspire people to become activists in order to change the world in a way that we never see a day like that again.”
“I had begun to think that we must start creating deeper, more meaningful programming that actually challenges our young people, in order to make them think, and to challenge who they are as Americans and as Jews,” Planer recalled.
This idea of American identity was particularly important to Planer, he said, since programming for Jewish teens tends to focus almost exclusively on Israel.
“As a youth director, I noticed that we did a tremendous job in connecting our young Jews to our spiritual homeland, Israel, but not to our physical homeland, America,” Planer said.
I would hear from so many teens when they [returned] from their summer trip to Israel, that [Israel] is where they ‘felt Jewish’… but [that] they lived here.”
Assuming that an overwhelming majority of young American Jews will not make aliyah, but rather, will create their Jewish lives in the U.S., Planer felt it was extremely important for teens to see the connections between the American and Jewish overarching narratives.
“We need to start making a Jewish connection to the one main country that has kept its promise to our people: that we could come here and live in peace, as well as survive and thrive [as Jews], without the government getting in our way,” Planer said. Planer also felt it was important for young Jews to appreciate the long history of social and political activism in American Jewry.
Creating this program is Planer’s personal method of tikkun olam. Rather than settling for a world in which yelling is our sole conception of civil discourse, Planer said he sees hope for the future in teaching kids how to find their own voices in order to engage in American democracy.
“This is in our DNA as Jews,” Planer said. “I thought it could be an entry point for young people who don’t feel connected to Judaism through the traditional religious route.”
So how does Planer ignite the light of inspiration in Jewish teens?
“On Etgar 36 journeys, we treat teens as real people,” Planer said. “We respect them and what they think, but we also have expectations of them to behave and act as real people. Once we create that bond, they see that we are truly interested in giving them an experience that will help them grow into the people they want to be intellectually and as activists.”
Part of recognizing and acknowledging teens as ‘real’ people, Planer said, is relating to them as Americans for whom being Jewish is just one of many facets of their lives and identities: “They tend to view themselves as citizens of the world, not just Jewish citizens.”
“Teens today are so comfortable in the diversity of their lives that we can’t use our old-school thinking of, ‘we need to create just Jewish experiences,’” he said. While many teens do appreciate the social opportunity to be within a Jewish group, Planer added, “they don’t see the world as ‘Jewish’ and ‘not Jewish.’”
“An Etgar 36 journey is really a key that is being given to the participants that opens up the world of their mind, their passion and their ability to find and use their voice,” Planer said. “I find that if we set the bar high and expect them to rise to the occasion, rather than wrap the teen in bubble wrap, they will.”
In February 2015, I had the pleasure of attending the Summit on Jewish Teens (hosted by The Jim Joseph Foundation, The Marcus Foundation, The Schusterman Family Foundation, and The Paul E. Singer Foundation) at the 2015 BBYO International Convention in Atlanta, GA. The 24 hours I spent at the Summit were inspiring, and I left enthused and in awe of the Jewish teens with whom I spent time.
The theme of this year’s International Convention was “Stronger Together,” and it was seamlessly integrated into the Summit’s programmatic structure.
The Summit began with lunch during which participants, Jewish communal professionals, educators, and philanthropists were joined by members of The Coalition of Jewish Teens, a group of teen leaders from the BBYO, NCSY, NFTY, USY, and Young Judaea youth movements. The Coalition and the Summit convened simultaneously, to strategize ways Jewish teens can work together to build a stronger, united Jewish community. Guided by the support and resources of each of the five major youth movements, these teens come from diverse perspectives, lives, and backgrounds, making them a well-rounded cross-section of the Jewish community’s teen leaders.
Sitting at lunch with a group of millennial teens, I was struck by how well each was able to articulate and express his or her unique Jewish identity. In the various programs, panels, and facilitated group sessions in which I participated, we explored topics such as leadership, community-building, and Jewish education in the context of what teens are thinking today, what their interests are, and what the possibilities are for their deeper involvement in Jewish life. In their own words, we heard from teens as they identified their goals for the Jewish community and the roles they envision for themselves within it.
The Summit concluded with a presentation by the Coalition of Jewish Teens in which they shared some of the key learnings and potential action items that emerged over the 24 hours they spent in prolonged conversation and planning with one another. The Coalition presented a mission statement for their work moving forward, which began with the lines: “We, the Coalition of Jewish Teens, stand united to shape the Jewish future through shared Jewish values.” Indeed these young people acted as a living, breathing example of not only the sophistication that teens bring to the table but of how the Jewish community truly is “Stronger Together.”
“As more and more young people and their families get on the information superhighway, they must be given content and incentives to travel the ‘Jewish lanes’ of the highway in addition to all of the other routes they take.”
This 1993 quote from one of the earliest Covenant Foundation grant reports – when the “information superhighway” was a mere country dirt road compared to the cyber-world of today – foretells the path that the Foundation and the field of Jewish education would take over the next decades. From its first cohort of grants awarded in 1991, the Covenant Foundation has embraced technology as a critical tool for Jewish learning and engagement. The past twenty-five years have been an unprecedented time of technological change, from the spread of the internet, to the invention of smartphones, to the explosion of social media, to the virtual reality and “cyber-physical-human” devices on the horizon.
At each step in this evolution, the Covenant Foundation has identified and supported projects – sixty-six between 1991 and 2014 – which sought to ensure that there would be enticing “Jewish lanes” among the copious technological options for communication, connection, learning and entertainment. Though the technological tools and media changed significantly through the decades, common themes are woven through these grants’ visions for what technology could achieve: expanding the reach of Jewish resources to new populations of learners, facilitating Jewish connections and communities beyond the boundaries of time and space, and empowering individuals to be creators of Jewish content as well as consumers.
This report profiles a selection of Covenant Grants that were particularly forward-thinking about how to apply new technological possibilities to Jewish education and engagement over five stages of technological development:
- The “proto-internet,” when Jewish communities and institutions discovered that “electronic bulletin boards” and “Free-Nets” could become virtual Jewish gathering spaces and resource libraries.
- The early web, when organizations and schools created their first websites and learned to access, and contribute to, expanding internet databases of Jewish texts and pedagogical tools.
- The rise of broadband, when faster and better internet technology allowed Jewish institutions to expand their reach and connect with learners in more immediate and meaningful ways (such as real-time, interactive video conferencing).
- Web 2.0, which multiplied the opportunities for learners and educators to create individualized, personally meaningful Jewish content and communities.
- The mobile revolution, which untethered technological tools from schools, synagogues, and even the home, making the Jewish world as close and accessible as one’s pocket.
As the pace of technological innovation increases, the Jewish community will need to continue to identify and nurture visionary ideas in order to keep Jewish education relevant and engaging for future generations. Perhaps in 2040 students will be taking virtual-reality field trips to the Western Wall, studying Talmud with interactive holographs of Hillel and Shammai, or learning Hebrew through personalized lessons that respond to their brain-wave patterns? Whatever future paths unfold, the Covenant Foundation and its grantees will undoubtedly be instrumental in bringing Jewish education to the forefront of technological innovation and experimentation, as they have for the past twenty-five years.
It’s Sunday morning, and a Jewish tween bounds out of bed with the enthusiasm generally reserved for his Xbox or Instagram. He sets off for his synagogue’s religious school, where he shares with his teacher and fellow students the latest progress he’s made on a project about an aspect of Judaism -- perhaps it’s music, or literature, or the story of creation -- that he has chosen precisely because it speaks to him.
When he finishes his course of study he won’t receive a report card or grade, but a digital badge: in the simplest terms, an icon signifying his accomplishment.
Parental pipe dream? Not according to Dr. Samuel Abramovich, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo (the State University of New York’s flagship campus) who studies the emerging use of digital badges in Jewish and secular education.
“This is definitely the near future,” said Abramovich. “Soon, I expect.”
To understand the concept of the digital badge, think about the sew-on merit badges that Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts earn in areas such as camping, first aid or canoeing. Then consider a generation enticed by the prospect of earning virtual accolades in video games: “achievements,” “tokens,” or “badges” earned when a player advances a level or accomplishes a feat.
“You want to earn them and maybe even display them socially within your online community of game players,” Abramovich said. “It recognizes your accomplishment. It’s a motivator.”
Digital badges may be sent to students in an e-mail, posted on an internal school website, awarded at school ceremonies or touted in synagogue newsletters. They can also be added to a student’s public profile by way of a transcript or Facebook page.
In some schools, everyone must pursue a badge of their own choosing. In others, it’s optional. Either way, badges recognize achievements that build on or go beyond the traditional curriculum. They can provide recognition for pursuits that are crucial but often go unmeasured, like tikkun olam or teamwork. They give students the independence of choosing a topic that piques their interest and is therefore particularly meaningful, and incentivize them to pursue that interest in creative ways, online and IRL (in real life).
“You could complete your Bar or Bat Mitzvah in a room with just a minyan, but that’s not what a lot of people do,” Abramovich said. “The digital badge is a micro version of that: ‘Here’s what I’ve done in my Jewish learning, in my Jewish study. Here’s what I think represents me as a Jewish adult, as a Jewish person. I want to share this with you. Can you please give me feedback? And I want to see what you’ve done.’”
So what does a top-notch badge program look like?
“That is a very challenging question,” Abramovich said. “Sometimes someone will call me and say, ‘I want to create digital badges. How do you do it?’ It’s a little like saying, ‘How do you teach math?’ There are many ways to teach math.”
At The Binah School (a recently-closed Orthodox girls’ middle and high school in Sharon, Mass.), students earned badges in topics as diverse as kindness, yoga, cooking and the Book of Joshua.
At the Reform Temple of Forest Hills, in Queens, students in pre-kindergarten through age 13 can choose among 33 badges as part of Project 613, a popular (though optional) new program.
“Traditionally you sat in a classroom with three rows, with a teacher in front and with a textbook,” said Faye Gilman, the temple’s educational leader. “This takes you to sitting in a circle, sitting on the floor, sitting in a computer lab. It takes you to a conversation rather than a monologue. And the best part is that it takes you outside, it takes you to your family, it takes you to the Ellis Island museum.”
“You have the opportunity to do this in school, but you also have the opportunity to say, ‘Mom and Dad, let’s look on the computer,’” Gilman continued. “’Let’s see what other badges we can achieve. What can we do as a family to make this happen?’’”
At The Epstein School in Atlanta, a digital badging pioneer, middle school students can choose among badges named after Jewish role models, including Elena Kagan and Ruth Messinger.
“This is about a child choosing to show their talents, interests and skills in a different way,” said Myrna Rubel, principal of The Epstein School’s middle school. “Kids choose, ‘How am I going to show I earned this badge? What are the characteristics of this badge? The whole idea was to use part of their life outside of school as well as their life in school.”
But Rubel cautioned against the temptation to use digital badges as yet another way to give students a “gold star” for learning a prayer or completing a task. “The whole point of this was not to make this a skill-based, ‘kids who do this get this,’” she said. “We didn’t want that. It’s not a substitute for a test. How you make it fun, to keep kids in the game, so to speak, is a challenge.” Teacher buy-in, she added, is crucial.
When it comes to digital badging programs, Abramovich agreed that so much depends on the context, the execution -- and the psychology of each individual learner. A badge signifying regular synagogue attendance, for instance, could give some students a motivating extra push. But others, he said, may respond, “You’re trying to badge synagogue attendance? I’m not going to go to synagogue!”
Abramovich had been studying the use of digital badges in secular education when, several years ago, he discovered that a number of Jewish institutions had begun to experiment with them in smart, interesting ways. “Who’s studying this?” he wondered. “Somebody has to be capturing, recognizing and trying to understand all this work.”
His research indicates promising results. “I think we are nearing a point where we can pretty reliably have some faith that digital badges can provide some benefit to Jewish education,” he said.
“We need to make sure there are no negative impacts,” Abramovich added. “Something that was executed perfectly can have strong positive outcomes, but if executed incorrectly can have negative impacts. Then what? How should badges be developed in Jewish education, for whom and where and when? There won’t be a simple pattern.”
These questions will be fodder for Abramovich’s future research.
Now, he is developing a project exploring how lessons learned from digital badging in Jewish education can be applied to traditionally underserved minorities with strong cultural and ethnic identities.
“Why not apply all these lessons we’re learning from digital badges in Jewish education and share them with interested groups who could then have similar benefit?” he said. “If that’s not tikkun olam, I’m not sure what is.”
By Barry Joseph, Associate Director for Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives
American Museum of Natural History
When powerful, new approaches to learning are introduced through digital tools, meaningful disruptions occur along the way.
This doesn’t mean everything that’s difficult is worthwhile. There are myriad challenges facing educators--and sustaining innovative practices which require additional resources is just one. But if the disruptions to on-going practices and expectations are anticipated and strategic, they can open up space for future innovations. When this happens, new approaches which previously seemed inaccessible, are suddenly within reach.
For example, take Project 613, a new optional learning opportunity offered by my synagogue, the Reform Temple of Forest Hills. Last year, with support from the Covenant Foundation, the religious school at RTFH introduced a new program to its 120 or so students. Project 613 offered almost three dozen digital badges organized into 5 Jewish-learning themed categories, and challenged students to complete missions (amongst a list of hundreds) and submit evidence. While it was far from perfect, the pilot year produced over 500 pieces of evidence, generating scores of photographs, drawings, Minecraft builds, and more, each demonstrating a connection made by the students, between something in their lives and some Jewish content or value.
For many of the stakeholders involved, however, Project 613 caused confusion. This was anticipated, as it didn’t fit into any existing box. In other words, it challenged - or disrupted - their idea of what learning is supposed to look like.
Project 613 is an interest-driven project, an opt-in system predicated on the passions of the students. This raises lots of questions for teachers. Should (or would) they be held responsible if their students didn’t participate? How would they find the time in their busy schedules to review (and provide feedback on) evidence submitted by each of their students?
Parents were held responsible for setting up their children’s online accounts. But if this wasn’t homework, should parents feel pressure to get their child to participate? Inversely, if their children were pursuing a badge, were they supposed to help, and spend their limited family time on this activity? How much help could, or should, the parents expect from the school?
And then of course, there were questions from the participating students, too. This wasn’t homework. And while the badges were certainly related to Jewish learning, they also connected students with their personal and often non-scholastic activities, like playing video games, watching movies, and eating at delis. Students needed to figure out for themselves why they should pursue a badge and why they should care if their peers knew of their achievements. Equally important, they needed to figure out how to choose a badge and select from the infinite pathways available before them to pursue one.
These are questions raised specifically by Project 613, which is now in its second year. The program might be working. Or it might not. But to the extent the school tackles the questions it raises at a broader level - not just about Project 613 but about digital learning strategies in general - then the implementation can have impact far beyond the goals of any one particular project. If the disruptions are addressed not as problems but as opportunities for growth, then the extra effort put towards addressing them can help everyone involved see the promise of new ways of learning in the digital age.
The 21st century classroom is changing. More and more schools have “maker spaces,” in which students can build, engineer and test the limits of their creativity. The acronym STEM, (science, technology, engineering and math education) has gained a foothold not just within the pedagogical lexicon of innovative schools but also in widespread practice. Across the country, teachers and administrators are taking steps to advance the learning spaces of their students and each school day brings a new opportunity to move platforms forward.
So where do Jewish Day Schools fit into this exciting wave of digital learning? One need not look any further than JCDSRI, the Jewish Community Day School of Rhode Island, for an excellent answer.
Since January 2014, JCDSRI has been in partnership with STEAM, a club whose members come from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, with the intention of supplementing school pedagogy and teaching elementary school age kids how to collaborate and construct. In addition to a JCDSRI design lab where kids integrate building and creating into their education, students at this school also learn how to incorporate art and aesthetics into the engineering and technical projects typically associated with STEM learning. At JCDSRI, the project is called KinderSTEAM.
JCDSRI is a progressive school, notes Adam Tilove, Head of School, where the teacher is the “guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.” This approach to education, Tilove said, meshes very well with the interactive design mentality; both are “about having the highest respect for people even if they are really young. Kids are coming in, not as blank slates but as intelligent, thoughtful individuals who want to be successful. In other words, we are making different assumptions about what kids can do.”
“Design fits with our mission,” said Adam Tilove, Head of School at JCDSRI. “Makerspaces operate under the premise of, let’s start with making something. STEAM starts with the underlying subject matter. But with human centered design, we start with the human being and build from there. It fits with the Jewish mission, building upon our common humanity.”
As examples of the school’s design lab work, Tilove added, the youngest kids in school read a story about a bird, and then attempted to design nests and birdhouses in a way to support birds’ needs: “It’s responding to literature in an active way.”
Similarly, he said, two years ago, the design lab was used to re-create Noah’s Ark. “They read the dimensions and they built different versions of it… and it looked very different from what we’d imagined,” Tilove laughed. The students then took their cardboard prototypes to the local JCC pool and floated them off. Another time, the students read a mishnah about Hanukkah, and they discussed whether the hanukkiah should have eight candles or one big one. Then they staged a hanukkiyah “build-off.”
Students at JCDSRI have the opportunity to design things using simple circuitry, copper wire and LED lights, as well as to utilize more basic materials like cardboard, markers, paper and tape in creative ways.
The school’s involvement in the design movement came about as overflow from a casual business meeting. Tilove read about a young local designer, found him on Twitter and took him out to lunch. The designer came to class and had fun playing games with the students. Soon thereafter, Tilove said, he received an email from Brown University, saying, “something along the lines of, ‘I hear you’re doing great things – can we collaborate with you?’”
Now, each JCDSRI class has an opportunity each week to go into the design lab. The experience of having a makerspace as part of the curriculum, Tilove said, has been “universally positive.”
“Design thinking,” he added, has been a paradigm shift in the culture of his school: “We’re all more willing to collaborate and work with each other, and listen to each other. And that’s directly because of the design lab.”
‘Kids want to build,” he said. “Building is joyous. It’s amazing to see something that you created, even if it’s silly and sloppy. You created something out of nothing and there it is in three dimensions. It’s exciting.” And Design lab education, is accessible to any school, no matter what their financial situation may be. “You don’t need that much,” Tilove said. “You need time on the schedule. You need a teacher who can be present, and you need faith and trust in children and their innate creativity and imagination. You need cardboard.
“What kids want is to rip cardboard apart,” Tilove laughed. “Don’t overthink it and don’t overspend. You want kids to create and build? Give them stuff they can break and mess up.”
Tilove is currently working with Brown and RISD to develop a useable, portable curriculum to share with other schools who want in on the design lab phenomenon: “our own proprietary design thinking process.”
Their vision is tikkun by design, which suggests that design thinking is a version of tikkun olam. “We are using our human resources to think about the needs of others and make their lives better,” he explained.
“We are trying to really enrich the curriculum, and make it something to share with other schools,” Tilove said. “It’s not a super-easy process. But that’s our dream.”
Seasoned educators know that regardless of the hours spent planning, sometimes, teachable moments take on a life of their own.
That’s precisely what happened when, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, hundreds of middle-school students participating in JCAT, a web-based project that involves virtual role playing and discussion around significant Jewish figures and events, took to their computers to question, process and begin to try and understand the harrowing events, in real time.
The catch? They were all “in character.”
This year’s JCAT case--set in France--concerns Laila Mokeddem, a young Muslim high school student who lives near Grenoble and was denied entry to her high school because she was wearing a hijab, and Gilles Blum, a Jewish high school student living in the Marais district of Paris, who was told that he could not attend classes while wearing a kippah that school officials deemed to be too large and distracting. Laila and Gilles challenge French law against ostentatious religious symbols, and claim that the ban violated their human rights. The French courts reject their appeals, and Gilles and Laila bring their case to the Jewish Court of All Time, where students are now currently debating and discussing French secularism, the ban on outward religious symbols, and related issues of anti-Semitism in France and the state of Jewish life in Europe.
And now, even more than that, too.
“We spent a lot of time, over several days, responding to questions and comments in a reflection forum, from the President of France to Lady Gaga,” explained Deborah Skolnick Einhorn, Assistant Professor of Jewish Education at Hebrew College and a RAVSAK Project Director, referencing just two of the many roles that the 2015-2016 JCAT middle school students are currently playing in this virtual game.
“Unprompted, the students began changing their JCAT profile pictures to French flags, or to the Eiffel Tower peace sign image, which in many ways mirrored what was happening on social media platforms outside the game. It reminded me of how this program is true experiential education.”
“We had a student who posted a condolence on his personal Facebook, page and it happened to have been the student who was playing the role of Pol Pot, the brutal Cambodian dictator,” said Jeff Stanzler, Director of the ICS group at the University of Michigan, and a co-creator of Place out of Time (the basis for JCAT and the brainchild of Stanzler and colleagues Michael Fahy and Jeff Kupperman, an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan-Flint).
“One of the ways that an online classroom enhances the learning experience is that it allows for a dramatization of relationships between self and character,” Kupperman said. “The students are playing all different people, contemporary and historical, and what gets foregrounded is ‘what do I think,’ ‘how do others think,’ and ‘how do I want to express myself to a captive audience?’”
Stanzler also explained that for these 7th and 8th grade students, this could be one of their first experiences with an engaged public audience who are very interested in what they think.
“It’s the ‘enchantment factor,’” added Yael Steiner, Student Programs Coordinator at RAVSAK, The Jewish Community Day School Network, quoting a term coined by Fahy about this process of finding a voice online. “When [the student playing] Golda Meir posts a speech, you really are transported as you read it. There’s a weight to what’s happening in the virtual space, and the students respond in such a serious way. They feel like their words matter. It’s quite empowering for that 12-year-old.”
Miriam Raider-Roth, a Project Director, a Professor of Educational Studies and Director of the University of Cincinnati Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture, called her introduction to JCAT an eye-opening experience, as both a professor and a parent. She discovered JCAT through her son, who participated in the pilot program when he was in 7th grade.
“He was playing Albert Einstein,” explained Raider-Roth, and I noticed something altogether different about his engagement. He was a shy writer and didn’t like to read aloud in class, but suddenly he was writing his character responses with force and power in that virtual space. And since then, we’ve seen a lot of kids like him use the space to locate and articulate their voice.”
“The virtual space [of the JCAT website] creates an emotional safe space, where a student can really inhabit their character fully, while also learning how to be respectful of differing opinions,” added Einhorn. In yet another real-life twist, Einhorn also mentioned that there’s a student currently playing the role of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right French political party Front National who has advocated for much stricter immigration policies in France. “And on the discussion board, the student playing Le Pen stayed in character, but did it in a gentle way, through coaching from her teacher.” That delicate dance of navigating the chasm between natural empathy the students might feel in their “real” lives and the historical accuracy required for them to play their roles successfully, has added benefits, Einhorn explains.
“This helps adolescents become safe online participants,” added Meredith Katz, Clinical Assistant Professor of Jewish Education and Coordinator of the Online MA Program at JTS, “and learn how to conduct polite online conversation. While that’s a lot for a 12 or 13-year-old to hold in his or her head, we are in partnership with classroom teachers, and they are helping students practice those conversations as well.”
This partnership becomes especially important when students are playing "controversial" or not so popular characters like LePen, added Katz, a JCAT Project Director. As she explained it, the characters are vital to a healthy discussion and an exciting simulation, but the students playing them can take a lot of heat, understandably. The Project Directors work with the teachers of the students who choose to take on these roles to provide support.
“From my perspective,” offered Jeff Stanzler, Director of the ICS group at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a Lecturer in the School of Education, “the virtual space contributes to the slowness of response time; allows us to take a beat and not respond off the cuff, as we might if we were face-to-face. In this game, students have to pause and carefully consider the merits of their words.”
On the JCAT site, someone opens a new conversation thread, and participants respond in kind. The faculty all agree that while there are exciting new ways that the technology of the JCAT program could be enhanced (with cool tech add-ons like “second-life avatars,”live video,or 3D real-time interactions),for sound pedagogical reasons, they’re not in a rush to go there.
“We know that the relatively slow pace of interactions that happen on the site, where you receive a message, and you might compose a response, but first, you might also show it to your teacher or peer--this process could take a whole day, and so the response doesn’t come immediately,” explained Kupperman. “This allows for some face-to-face classroom interactions that are actually pretty important in the pedagogical sense.”
Kupperman added that when considering JCAT’s merits, it’s crucial to remember that the middle-schoolers are participating in a classroom, not a distance learning course where kids are sitting at a computer on their own.
“Most often, there’s a whole classroom doing things together, and teachers are using what’s going on in JCAT as a starting point for interesting discussions in the classroom. And we don’t want to undercut those necessary learning opportunities.”
And the learning opportunities don’t just exist for the students. In fact, the Reshet, the RAVSAK-run email listserv that exists just for the teachers, a space for them to discuss what’s happening in their classrooms, has become a place where teachers can connect and form community, and share resources, too. “We have 35 teachers who currently participate in JCAT—in the early years there were 10—and in addition to webinars, the Reshet has taken off as a space for teachers to share, learn from each other and connect. We can see how much the teachers value that space, and their expressions of gratitude to other teachers for sharing what’s happening in their classrooms,” said Steiner.
One more layer of JCAT comes from the work of graduate student "mentors," students enrolled in JCAT-related coursework run by the project directors at their home institutions, noted Katz. The graduate students assume characters with the simultaneous assignments of participating in the simulation as a learner exploring the case and as a coach to probe the analytic and discussion skills of the middle school characters. It is a unique opportunity for these students to explore blended learning "in action." They use course time to reflect on their experiences, consider examples of student work and brainstorm potential developments for the case. The Michigan students have a weekly face-to-face class meeting while at JTS and Hebrew College the courses take place online.
“Without this a virtual space,” said Einhorn, our classroom wouldn’t exist. We have graduate students all over the world, who, for various reasons, can’t be physically present on campus, and so the seminar must be virtual, in order to work. Through the online classroom, they can share their collective field experience and reflect, which make this a unique and essential learning opportunity.”
And the field is taking note. Raider-Roth noted that a recent book, Going Online with Protocols: New Tools for Teaching and Learning, published by Teachers College Press, offers a write up of the JCAT protocol used for the teachers’ webinar. “The protocol offers a guide for how to create a structured discussion, where instead of saying ‘what do you all think,” which can get messy in a webinar format, there’s a process for walking through a conversation.”
“What’s happening in the simulation spaces has been important to me and my students here,” Raider-Roth added. We’re looking at how this type of learning can change, support and improve pedagogy.”
“The world of Jewish education is contributing to larger conversations about technology and simulated play,” she said. “Now, the field of Jewish Education is not just learning from General education, but also, informing it.”
Living in a digital age is an incredible thing. Communication and information is just a click away. New technologies have afforded us the ability to do things we never thought possible in the past. No one can argue that technology isn’t great.
But living in a digital age also places an onus of responsibility on all of us, and perhaps the most responsibility falls on the shoulders of parents and educators of young children, adolescents and teens.
Conventional wisdom assumes that parents should be monitoring their adolescent’s use of technology (in all of it’s forms) and even better—having regular conversations with their kid about the right way to engage with others online. This is important. Being a courteous, respectful and savvy citizen of the online universe is crucial.
Can Judaism help? It’s probably safe to assume that when most parents and educators consider the questions that need to be asked of their children and of themselves, they haven’t necessarily thought to include Jewish values in that estimation. What arethe Jewish values at issue in the use of technology, anyway? How has Judaism responded to technological change in the past? How might the ubiquity of technology in our lives today affect core ethical and Jewish dilemmas that we face? And how can the use of technology support Jewish life?
These are just some of the questions that Text Me: Ancient Jewish Wisdom Meets Contemporary Technology aims to help families answer through a variety of educational programs geared toward specific cohorts of parents and kids.
Developed by a team of family educators working out of the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland (JECC), the Text Me program was based on the findings of those educators who discovered that local parents were indeed ready and willing to have these important conversations with their kids, and in a Jewish context. They just needed to be facilitated. And, of course, the parents needed to be willing to consider and reflect on their own use of technology as well.
When we post photos of our children online, do we consider the long-term implications? Could parents use Jewish values as a litmus test for whether they utilize technology in a spiritually enhancing way? And do we control our devices or do our devices control us?
“Text Me offers a series of opportunities for kids and parents to explore technology together, and to empower parents to enrich family learning with tweens and teens,” explained Dr. Jeffrey Schein, Director of the Covenant project: Ancient Jewish Wisdom Meets Contemporary Technology and Senior Education Consultant for the Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood.
“It also offers parents the chance to conduct a technological heshbon hanefesh of sorts, and take a look at the kind of profile and media presence they’ve created for themselves,” he continued.
At its core, Text Me is about family dialogue. Along with his colleague Brian Amkraut, the Executive Director of the Laura and Alvin Siegal Lifelong Learning Program at Case Western Reserve University, Schein has developed methodologies that trigger these dialogues, including ice breakers, Jewish values and ethical frames that are used to examine how people interact, an exploration of the Jewish concept to love thy neighbor as thyself, and more.
For example, in a program affectionately called “awkward family photos” based on an open-source website of the same name, kids and parents look at a packet of eponymous photos and consider together which might be appropriate to post online, and what the outcomes might be of such decisions. The Jewish/ethical microscope for reflecting on their decision is “would it be okay to post if I were the central character” in the posted picture.
“We have discussions about laughing at versus laughing with people,” Schein said. “We ask families to take a step back and think about kavod habriyot (human dignity), chaveirut and yedidut (friendship) and how these values affect our decisions.”
Schein was quick to note that there are “extraordinary stories” of the ways in which technology has increased acts of gemilut chasidim, from caring communities providing digital support to a struggling member, to websites that allow individuals to perform acts of chesed in a very direct way.
“There’s a dimension of mussar in this conversation,” Schein added, referencing the Jewish ethical and cultural movement that originated in 19th century Eastern Europe and has, of late, experienced a revival amongst secular Jews. “In particular, we examine the Jewish value of shmirat halashon, and how watching what we’re saying and being careful with our words can help us live more ethically, online.”
The classic Text Me program was designed to be replicable and adaptable to a range of educational spaces and age groups, Schein explained. In fact, just last week he ran a program with teens and their parents in Evanston, IL, while later this year he’ll be in California working on a series of programs for adults and teens there. In one of those programs, Schein will partner with Common Sense Media, to help families further navigate different areas of technology. He’ll also bring Text Me to Philadelphia and New York City, later this year.
“Our dream is to keep growing and helping people think about these critical issues,” Schein offered. “But ultimately, the content of the programs isn’t what’s most important. What matters most is the dialogue that ensues.”
Who doesn’t love to play?
From the toddler who just wants to take toys apart and zoom across the yard to the teen who loves Minecraft to the adult who gets super competitive over a game of Monopoly, we all know play is enjoyable and also, that play facilitates learning.
“It’s the most natural thing we do,” said Barry Fishman, Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and School of Education. “Parents play with their babies--peekaboo, mimicry and object permanence games--these games are the basics of learning.”
But then school comes along. And while the game playing doesn’t end there, suddenly, it’s of a different breed. Now, students are playing to win… a good grade. “Students become focused on getting the highest score,” Fishman continued, “and this isn’t always a good thing.”
“The way school and our current cultural context is shaped,” he said, “discourages risk-taking and failure, because it’s a high-stakes game. If you fail along the way, there’s a good chance you’re not going to get into the college you want, which creates an atmosphere of negativity and pressure on learning. But failure is so important; the things we fail at are our most important learning experiences.”
Fishman is certainly not alone in his thinking. In fact, scholars across the country are currently researching, writing and speaking publicly about ways in which we can lower the heat of the high school and college pressure cooker, help kids enjoy learning, and learn vital life skills in the process.
“We’ve created an environment where it’s not OK to experiment or be off-topic for even a moment,” Fishman asserted, “and it’s a culture that turns people off of learning and creates an extrinsic set of motivators for learning. We really need to think about changing the design of learning, and help students seek out challenges,” he added.
So… how can technology help?
First, consider the concept of “gameful learning,” a pedagogical approach that takes the best aspects of gaming and applies that knowledge to the learning environment, while placing a high priority on student engagement.
Next, enter GradeCraft, a learning management system dedicated to supporting the “gameful” classroom, currently being developed by Fishman and his colleagues at the University of Michigan.
“We essentially have three basic human needs that motivate our actions,” Fishman explained, as way of introducing the ideas behind GradeCraft. “First, to feel like we have autonomy to make choices that matter, second, to have a sense of belonging and relatedness and third, a sense of competence that we’ll be supported, and be given a challenge that we can accomplish.”
To this end, GradeCraft.com is a tool that supports a diversified grading system.
A student enters the GradeCraft site and sees all of the assignments for the semester laid out for her. She can access a grade predictor, and calculate how many points she needs to reach various levels in the course; essentially “gaming” the class, by creating a strategy developed upon clicking and choosing how much she needs to accomplish in order to get to a specific place. She has a student dashboard, with current points earned and total points available, a list of course assignments, a calendar and badges. There are also student-determined assignment weights, self-awarded points, and more.
“Not everybody takes tests well,” Fishman said, touching on an old anxiety but one that is very relevant for today’s students, who are subjected to far more standardized assessment testing than ever before. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t know the material. There are other ways to demonstrate mastery, and we can use GradeCraft to assess where students are across these diversified pathways.”
(Visit the GradeCraft website for links to YouTube tutorials which explain how each aspect of the system works.)
What’s more, beyond the individual student, technology like GradeCraft creates ways for students to band together, to compete against other students, to form groups that work toward a common goal, and to open up the classroom learning space, explained Fishman.
“If your starting grade on any assignment is out of 100%,” he said, “then you can only lose from there. If you get a 99%, you’ve lost a point. You’ve gone down. It’s a losing design, one that only allows you to chip away at perfection.”
Instead, Fishman advocates starting everybody in the class at zero, giving students the freedom to finish wherever they want on the scale, but laying out the pathways where he or she can earn different grade outcomes.
Fishman admitted that this is not easy for the college professor or classroom teacher to manage. “The first time I taught this way [without GradeCraft], I had a dozen spreadsheets going, and my students were lost. But we’re been building tools to support this kind of teaching.”
Currently, about 20 instructors and 4,000 students in approximately 12 different areas at The University of Michigan use GradeCraft. There’s also a middle school history teacher in Virginia who is experimenting with the site, as Fishman and his colleagues work out the early kinks in the system.
Ultimately, however, the secret to successful use of technology in the classroom isn’t about websites, badges, videos or games. It’s about two other essential components.
“First, motivation is paramount,” Fishman, said. “Motivation, and the study of what gets people to engage, to persist and to see tasks through to completion are essential. Without it, there is no learning.”
And second? “The secret of educational technology is that it’s never about the technology,” Fishman said. “Instead, it’s always about what’s happening in the classroom.”
In classrooms and living rooms across the country, adults concerned with getting children to read tend to see digital technology as either poison (screens have taken over!) or panacea (if only we had more laptops!). In “Tap, Click, Read,” Lisa Guernsey, a journalist and director of the Early Education Initiative and the Learning Technologies Project at New America, and Michael H. Levine, a child development and policy expert and founding director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, propose a nuanced middle ground. Drawing on a wealth of research, Guernsey and Levine chart a promising path towards a new, fuller definition of 21st century literacy. The authors spoke with us about their discoveries and suggestions for reimagining literacy, Jewish and otherwise.
Covenant Foundation: What inspired you to write this book?
Michael Levine: We’re both deeply concerned with educational opportunity in America. How do we sleep at night knowing that more than two thirds of America’s fourth graders aren’t reading well? What we’ve been doing as a nation clearly is not working. We wanted to get a nuanced, more practical and more balanced view of how digital technologies might be part of the solution, and not just part of what people think of as the problem.
Lisa Guernsey: Raising two kids in the digital age, I’ve been perplexed but also fascinated by how digital media is changing the way children learn and the way families learn together. That, combined with new science on how important the very early years are in children’s lives. Learning to read does not start in kindergarten or first grade, but with the very first conversations that are happening when children are babies. Put those two big trends together and you have a fascinating, but also a really challenging, combination of factors.
CFN: What does it mean for an educator to adopt a “tap, click, read” mindset?
LG: We want educators to feel they can tap into resources -- everything from public libraries to public media that are often not in their immediate line of sight of networks, or research. The tap piece is also playing into the idea that there’s a lot of tapping on tablets that’s happening at home and in classrooms. To click, for children, is to actively engage with something. Children want to participate, to click and see what’s behind something. We should recognize that as a moment of engagement, and not try to ignore it or consider it just a distraction.
ML: Reading is still very, very important for gaining the life skills that matter most in a digital and global age. But we want to signal that reading and literacy are evolving -- just as reading and literacy evolved from the innovation of the story around the fire to the printing press.
CFN: What does 21st century literacy look like, and what does “Readialand” have to do with it?
LG: Twenty-first century literacy means more than just reading words on a print page. It has to include both the act of participating in communication and creating ideas, stories, messages that emanate out there. That means really helping today’s students become more than just consumers. It means helping them to become creators, too. Readialand is this notion that children are growing up in an ecosystem with all sort of forces around them that mold and help to shape how they think about the world. We should be trying to help children’s ecosystems evolve so there are lots of different opportunities for literacy learning, both digital and paper, new ways and old, so that they really have almost a 360 degree surround sound of literacy opportunities.
CFN: How can screens, and digital learning generally, enhance Jewish literacy and Jewish identity?
ML: There are so many interesting examples of innovation in the Jewish education space. Take for example G-dcast, which is a super interesting way of engaging young people in stories about the Torah and ways in which they can learn about life’s lessons without having to delve deeply into how the sages might interpret the parsha. They can take a point of view themselves because the lesson feels more vibrant and interactive. Digital technologies can help children actively participate in and digest important moments in Jewish history or events in Jewish culture. There is much that Jewish educators can do by introducing other relevant resources that teach about the Holocaust or common values – for example, Facing History and Ourselves. Teachers can use an array of digital tools, including videos and podcasts, to make things compelling.
CFN: What suggestions do you have for Hebrew teachers, who often struggle mightily with promoting literacy?
ML: Oh my gosh, I had such a challenge myself. I went to Hebrew school for many years and became a Bar Mitzvah, but I never learned to speak Hebrew. If technologies were used more productively I absolutely would have learned Hebrew much better than I did. If, for example, we were using technologies like YouTube and Instagram that would allow me to see where my cousins in Israel grew up, and which might have given me an appreciation for the pioneer path that my relatives took leaving Brooklyn in 1924, I would have been so much more engaged and motivated to master the language.
CFN: As a parent, I regularly field requests for iPhones, iPads, Xboxes and Kindle Fires. In fending off the onslaught of screens, am I actually depriving my children of essential tools for 21st century literacy?
ML: Get off the guilt trip! There is no one road to Rome here. Most parents who are reading this article are probably pretty much on top of what the right balance is. That said, I will comment that those families that have decided that their 3, 4, and 5-year-olds should have very limited or no access to digital technologies are right to have limits in place, but might want to think about a “no screen time” rule a little bit further. These devices are part of the currency of modern life.
CFN: What is the age at which a child should be given an iPhone?
LG: I really think it has to do a lot with family culture and family need. As the mother of an 11-year-old who now has an iPhone, it became a matter of giving kids a little bit more freedom, a little bit more of their own things over time, so they can feel some agency and ability to use and connect with these different devices. By middle school I’m finding -- and this is definitely anecdotal -- there are many kids who are using their devices for their reading and their homework definitely, but even more so to understand their culture, kind of a “kid culture,” and to talk to each other about that culture. I wanted my kids to have the opportunity to participate in those conversations.