Dear Edutopia Friend,

There is so much happening in the world of new media and the opportunities for classroom collaboration and interactive learning get more exciting everyday. To help you incorporate and use these great new resources, Edutopia has updated last year's extremely popular new-media guide with new tools and resources for the 2010-11 school year.

Our latest classroom resource guide, Back-to-School Guide: Jump Start Learning with New Media is filled with new and updated ideas to help you build a classroom that speaks to how our students learn best. Whether it's breaking the digital ice or making learning social, this resource-packed guide highlights 10 engaging ways to inspire and connect with your students from the moment they arrive until the summer bell rings.

I hope you'll download our free Back-to-School Guide: Jump Start Learning with New Media, and share it with your colleagues, too. Now you can also easily download our guide to your iPad, making it easy to have the tips and tools you need at your fingertips!

From tips on how to "Survey Your Experts" to "Contribute to Science," our new media guide is packed with resources to help you explore and expand the way you teach, making learning more fun and relevant.

So please take advantage of our special Back-to-School Guide and share it with other teachers and educators in your community.

Thanks for being such an important part of the Edutopia community and have a great school year!

Sincerely,

Cindy Johanson Executive Director The George Lucas Educational Foundation Publisher of Edutopia

By Peter Margolis

I have been creating online courses for a long time. I have been a student and teacher of Jewish Studies for even longer. But, with rare exceptions, I have not been creating and teaching online Jewish Studies courses. For over a decade, I have attended conferences, given lectures, and read beautifully-written, inspiring papers about the promise of the Internet to revolutionize Jewish learning. And, as everyone knows, after the conference, we all go our separate ways and nothing much changes.

Perhaps that should not come as much of a surprise. We Jews tend to be latecomers who catch up quickly, and then add our own special twist. Several varieties of the Flood Story had been making the rounds of the ancient Middle East for a couple thousand years before we came along and gave it a revolutionary monotheistic message. Likewise, online learning has been around long enough to be firmly established and to outlive the initial hype. Now it’s time to make it Jewish.

By Rabbi Laura A. Baum

Jewish learning has never been restricted to classrooms. For generations, rich learning experiences have taken place at kitchen tables, corner stores, fields, and campfires. Even Biblical mythology describes the Jews carrying the Ark as they wandered in the desert. With today’s technology, Jewish education is more portable and more accessible than ever. BlackBerries, iPhones, satellite radios, and electronic book readers put Jewish learning in our pockets and at our fingertips at any time and in any place.

by Judith Rosenbaum and Emily Scheinberg, Jewish Women’s Archive

Jewish education today does double duty. It is expected not only to teach Jews, but also to build Jews. In the 21st century, both the content and methods of Jewish education are broadening to encompass the goals of not only transmitting information and skills but also of shaping a whole Jewish person and building sustainable Jewish identity. Rather than viewing students as vessels to fill with knowledge about topics such as Torah, Hebrew, prayer, and Israel, many educators are thinking just as carefully about how to build students’ ownership of and commitment to a more holistic kind of Jewish learning as they are thinking about content. Engaging students in their Jewish education means helping them connect to Jewish life through multiple entry points, using new technology and other vehicles that students find meaningful. 

by Yitzchak Schwartz
Overview

We are at the early stages of a quantum leap in educational opportunity, made possible by recent advances in videoconference technology. While videoconferencing has existed in the past, it has just recently become affordable through advances in IP (Internet Protocol) technology. To provide teachers with professional development opportunities in the comfort of the local setting
Today there exist several hundred museums, science centers, art institutes and cultural centers offering thousands of distance learning opportunities through videoconferences to schools and their students. These institutions employ outstanding educators trained in delivering excellent content to early childhood, elementary, middle and high school students via videoconference. Their skill, coupled with the resources available to them in their centers, make their presentations interesting, exciting and compelling. Students are drawn to the content and the educator, resulting in very successful and exciting lessons (designed to both support and enhance school curricula) that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Thus, a world of educational opportunity can be brought to students in the comfort of their school setting. And as students develop a facility with the interactivity of videoconferencing they become more confident learners, while adding to their repertoire of learning skills.