At New Milford High School in New Jersey, the school’s official Facebook page keeps its 1,100 fans updated on sports events and academic achievements. Students who traveled to Europe this spring for a tour of Holocaust sites blogged daily about their experiences, and received comments from all over the world. Other students have used the video voice service Skype to talk to their peers in states like Iowa for school projects.

For Principal Eric C. Sheninger, the micro-blogging tool Twitter has become his mainstay for professional development as well as school promotion. Through Twitter contacts, he formed a partnership with a company that donated technology equipment and training to the school, and he linked up with CBS News, which brought national exposure to the high school’s programs.

“I used to be the administrator that blocked every social-media site, and now I’m the biggest champion,” Sheninger says. “I’m just someone who is passionate about engaging students and growing professionally, and I’m using these free tools to do it.”

Just a few years ago, social networking meant little more to educators than the headache of determining whether to penalize students for inappropriate activities captured on Facebook or MySpace. Now, teachers and students have a vast array of social-networking sites and tools—from Ning to VoiceThread and Second Life—to draw on for such serious uses as professional development and project collaboration. Educators who support using social networking for education say it has become so ubiquitous for students—who start using sites like Webkinz and Club Penguin when they are in elementary school—that it just makes sense to engage them this way.

Continue reading at www.edweek.org.

Some kids would do almost anything to get their hands on one of Apple's new iPad tablet computers, but a select group of sixth-graders at Blue Heron Middle School will need only to attend science class next year in order to reach that goal.

Teacher Roger Mills has earned the teacher equivalent of extra credit by securing six grant-funded iPads for use in his classes next year with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Port Townsend Education Foundation.

"Technology for its own sake is not a good thing," Mills said. "But it's a great hook for them to become interested in what they need to learn."

While there is the possibility that some students will get to take the devices home overnight, in most cases they will share them with others in an academic environment.

Continue reading at www.peninsuladailynews.com.

While many high school students in Great Falls enrolled in summer school courses online this year, a new state program is ramping up efforts to get students enrolled in online high school courses this fall — for free.

Montana's Digital Academy based at the University of Montana in Missoula is planning to offer 45 online high school courses this fall. This is the first year of the state-funded program.

"There have been other efforts (before)," said Bob Currie, director of the Digital Academy. "But it wasn't statewide. This is really the first statewide program."

The idea of a digital or online academy has been batted around for years in Montana as a way to spread educational opportunities across the state for a variety of reasons. Currie said rural school districts with students who want to take an elective course have often been hindered from doing so because their district doesn't have the money to pay for a teacher for that subject.

Continue reading at www.greatfallstribune.com.

Moton Elementary School fifth-grade students talked and interacted with Damon Talley just as if he were right in the room with them — only he wasn't.

He was at the Kennedy Space Center, yet he could see the students, call on them and show them cool stuff.

For the first time at Moton, Juretta Carr's science students took advantage of special equipment and a distance learning network, with assistance from Hernando School District instructional technology specialist Roger Cousins, to bring Talley, the Digital Learning Network coordinator at NASA, to the classroom.

The children were enthralled as Talley talked directly with them, illustrated the tendencies of solids and liquids, and showed them things they had never seen before on equipment that most elementary schools don't have.

Continue reading at www.tampabay.com.

We’d like to invite you to come talk about your visions for what Jewish education could be if we “did everything right.”  What are the hallmarks of the best Jewish learning you’ve experienced or imagined, and how could we make these the norm for all Jewish education?

 

The backdrop for this discussion is a new initiative we have launched at the Lippman Kanfer Institute aimed at creating broad-scale change in Jewish education that builds on the many changes already taking place – but largely unconnected to one another – within specific educational arenas – like those we explored this year in our previous FutureTense discussions.  We believe that a number of principles have emerged in recent years, such as learner empowerment, the role of relationships in achieving educational impact, and the centrality of meaning and purpose as educational goals, that are beginning to define a powerful vision of what Jewish education can and should be.  However, in our still siloed educational world, putting these principles into action consistently will require that we forge new coalitions among “changemakers” in various settings and arenas.

 

To kick off this initiative, the Institute is holding a series of conversations among educators and learners to explore their visions for Jewish education.  We held the first of these last week in San Francisco with fascinating results.  So, we thought we would take the opportunity of our scheduled session on June 10 to invite you to be part of a similar conversation here.

 

If you are able and interested in joining us, here are the two questions to think about in advance:

1.                What are you seeing in Jewish education today – programs, people, trends, ideas, etc. – that excites and energizes you?

2.                What do you imagine Jewish education could look like in ten years if we do things “right”?

 

The conversation will happen Thursday, June 10th 5:00 PM at the JESNA Office in NYC.

If you are interested in being part of the conversation, please let Becca Leshin know at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .