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Intro to Jewish Experiential Education Featured
In April 2012,Grsinpoon-Steinhardt Awards winners participated in a webinar on Jewish experiential education with guest speaker Mark Young of the JTS William Davidson Graduate School. You may wish to download the PowerPoint presentation from this session before watching the video:
Introduction to Jewish Experiential Education (1.35 MB)
If you are a current or former Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award winner, we encourage you to fill out this brief survey after viewing the webinar. (Total running time: 70 minutes)
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Learn Hebrew Vocabulary Online for free
You can now learn Hebrew online for free and increase your vocabulary with eHebrew.org's dictionary of English & Hebrew terms organized by topic.
http://www.ehebrew.org is a new and one of a kind website to help anyone learn Hebrew quickly. What sets this website apart from other English to Hebrew Dictionaries is that the words are organized into distinct topics, teaching students the most common and useful words in each topic.
With over 1,000 terms and growing, http://www.ehebrew.org looks to be the premier thematically organized He ...
- Books
The Jewish Lens Featured
The Jewish Lens (TJL) provides experiential Jewish educational programming, engaging youth and young adults in the exploration of Jewish values, identity and tradition while discovering the diversity and unity of Klal Yisrael (Jewish Peoplehood). TJL’s innovative methodology couples the emotional impact of photography with more traditional text-based learning, empowering participants to both strengthen their own link to Judaism and then express it through their own photographs and commentary.
- Organizations
Classroom Technology Featured
This webinar, with guest expert Morrisa Golden-Sieradski, is a follow-up discussion to the Quick Bytes newsletter on the same topic (see the newsletter in our archives). Click on the link above to view the full recording of this session (total running time: 44 minutes). You may also wish to visit some of the following resources (not every item on this list was discussed in the webinar):
Custom-built Google Search example
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Innovation and Transformation From Generation to Generation: JESNA's 30th Anniversary Annual Report
JESNA's commitment to transforming Jewish education is driven by a vision of a vibrant Jewish future. In a world where old models are no longer sufficient to maintain even the status q ...
- Annual Reports
Planting Seeds and Nurturing Sprouts: Farming and Jewish Education, featuring Nati Passow, director of the Jewish Farm School Featured
In March 2012, members of the Jewish Education Change Network participated in a webinar with Nati Passow, Executive Director of the Jewish Farm School. This session discusses the Jewish Farm School and explores its application to Jewish education (both in and out of the farm). Click on the link above to view the full video of this webinar (total running time: 57 minutes).
You may also wish to download the PowerPoint presentation from this session:
Jewish Farm School Presentation (2.3 MB)
- Interactive Resources - Webinars
A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges Featured
As the professional leaders of an organization that works to support Israel on campus, we are often
asked by other Israel supporters if the pro-Israel community is winning or losing the battle on
campus for Israel. Our answer is it depends on which battle you are talking about.
We are winning one battle but losing the other.
The pro-Israel community’s battle in much of the rest of the world, where Israel is mostly unpopular,
is to halt efforts to turn Israel into an international pariah akin to apartheid South Africa. Our battle
in the U.S., however, where Israel is mostly popular, is to maintain long-term two party support. It’s
not good enough that we stop the U.S. from becoming anti-Israel. We have to make sure the U.S.
remains pro-Israel, which is a much taller task.
Our primary task on campus is not to fight the anti-Isr ...
- Research Reports and Studies
Digital Textbook Playbook Featured
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Jewish Virtual Learning Networks: A mapping of online ‘Communities of Practice’ in the North American Jewish institutional world Featured
- Research Reports and Studies
Jewcology Featured
Jewcology is a project of graduates of ROI (http://roicommunity.org), who have come together to create a resource for the entire Jewish-environmental community. Jewcology incorporates collaboration from a wide range of Jewish environmental leaders and organizations worldwide. This project was funded by the ROI Innovation Fund.
The long-term goal of this project is to build a multi-denominational, multi-generational, regionally diverse community of Jewish environmental activists, who are learning from one another and from an expanding set of Jewish-environmental resources, how to educate their communities about our Jewish responsibility to protect the environment.
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Recent Mergers of Bureaus of Jewish Education Featured
This webinar, facilitated by JESNA Education Consultant Steven Kraus, is a follow-up discussion to the Quick Bytes newsletter on the same topic (see the newsletter in our archives). Click on the link above to view the full recording of this session (total running time: 54 minutes).
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Technology Integration in the Jewish Classroom Featured
In January 2012, Grsinpoon-Steinhardt Awards winners participated on a webinar with The Jewish Education Project's Miriam Brosseau discussing technology integration in Jewish educational settings. Miriam Brosseau hails from the great state of Wisconsin; at Madison she earned her undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies and Modern Hebrew. She later went on to get a master's in Jewish Professional Studies from the Spertus Institute, where she focused on educational vision, new Jewish culture, and technology. Miriam has worked in educational and programmatic positions with the World Zionist Organization, Shorashim, Hillel, and the BJE of Chicago. Jewish professional by day, Jewish musician by night, Miriam is currently the social media coalitions manager at the Jewish Education Project and half of the "biblegum pop" duo Stereo Sinai....
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Mishna & Media Literacy: a Webinar with G-dcast's Sarah Lefton Featured
In January 2012, memebrs of the Jewish Education Change Network participated in a webinar with G-dcast's Sarah Lefton, exploring the interweaving of Mishna learning and media literacy. Click on the link above to view the full recording of this session (total running time: 60 minutes).
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Quick Bytes: Recent Mergers of Bureaus of Jewish Education Featured
Increased demands for greater efficiency and effectiveness are leading a growing number of North American Jewish organizations to consider merging or consolidating operations. Over the past 10 years day schools, complementary schools, community centers, cultural organizations, social service organizations, and federations have merged or consolidated. In addition, some "functional" community federations have created community consortia to share certain services (e.g., purchasing utilities and supplies, financial management, benefits coordination, etc.) with other communal agencies in order to enhance service delivery, consolidate infrastructure and resources, and reduce costs. The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), which has been monitoring and facilitating information sharing about these ventures, expects the number of mergers and consolidations to increas ...
- Research Reports and Studies
Representative Practices: Mergers, Consolidations, Strategic Alliances and Efficiencies in the Federation Movement Featured
This report from JFNA provides examples of mergers, consolidations and strategic alliances that occurred between Federations and agencies in eight different communities since 2003. You may also wish to review our January 2012 publication Quick Bytes: Recent Mergers of Bureaus of Jewish Education.
Download the report here:
- Research Reports and Studies
Afterschool Evaluation 101: How to Evaluate an Expanded Learning Program Featured
Afterschool Evaluation 101 is a how-to guide from The Harvard Family Research Project for conducting an evaluation. It is designed to help out-of-school time (OST) program directors who have little or no evaluation experience develop an evaluation strategy. The guide will walk you through the early planning stages, help you select the evaluation design and data collection methods that are best suited to your program, and help you analyze the data and present the results.
Evaluation helps your OST program measure how successfully it has been implemented and how well it is achieving its goals. You can do this by comparing the activities you intended to implement and the outcomes you intended to accomplish to the activities you actually implemented and the outcomes you actually achieved.
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Web Tools for Jewish Formal and Informal Experiential Education Featured
Future classrooms will bear little resemblance to those of the previous century. Already, the boundaries between formal Jewish education, i.e., traditional classroom learning, and informal or experiential Jewish education, i.e., camp, youth programs , trips to Israel, etc., have begun to blur. The rapid evolution of computer hardware (Smart Boards, laptops, and mobile devices) and Web 2.0 applications are bringing the outside world into the classroom and learning spaces into the outside world. This integration of formal and informal experiential education in new technological platforms has been described as Jewish Integrated Experiential Education, or JIEE.
Yet for those who wish to break through their bewilderment at the burgeoning of technological resources for formal and informal education, there is a simple key ...
Learning with The 2011 Jewish Futures Competition Winners Featured
In December 2011, members of the Jewish Education Change Network participated in a webinar with the 2011 Jewish Futures Competition winners, Ben Weiner and Andrea Rose Cheatham Kasper. Andrea and Ben share their proposals for new initiatives blending traditional Jewish values and new modes of engagement, and engage in further discussion with webinar participants (total running time: 59 minutes). Click on the link above to view the full recording. You may also view the winning films, and learn more about Ben Weiner and Andrea Rose Cheatham Kasper, at The Jewish Futures website. To view the winning videos on YouTube, click here for Andrea and ...
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Congegational Education and Whole Person Learning Featured
This webinar was recorded in November 2011, and features Cyd Weissman, Director of Innovation in Congregational Learning at the Jewish Education Project in New York (total running time: 62 minutes). Cyd has spearheaded the Jewish Education Project’s work with the Coalition of Innovating Congregations and LOMED, a cutting-edge initiative to transform congregational learning. In the Webinar, Cyd talks talk about some of the latest work with congregations to nurture “holistic learning,” and facilitates discussion among participants. You may also wish to view the entire short film that Cyd shares in the session, "The High Five," on YouTube.
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Jewish Food for Thought Featured
From the artist: This series of animations represents my personal journey in a complicated relationship with Judaism. I spent my life gravitating towards, and making, narrative art that explores the human condition from a psychological, philosophical, and existential perspective. While Judaism offers thousands of years of wisdom on the human condition, I avoided it as a source because of what I perceived to be its preachy and sometimes judgmental tone.
I became filled with questions about how much my Jewish heritage had influenced how I was raised, how I behaved, how I thought, and even who I was as a person and an artist. What I discovered was a wealth of wisdom that was just sitting, waiting to be mined. Within the Jewish texts were crucial teachings and lessons that applied as much to our contemporary lives as they did when they wer ...
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