As summer approaches and the school year draws to a close, most teachers look forward to a well-deserved break from teaching. However, for a select handful of Yavneh Academy educators, the teaching will continue for a bit longer, but with a very different audience in a very different venue.
ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education, has become one of the world’s premier educational organizations with over 100,000 members. Their annual conference and expo is considered the preeminent event for educators worldwide. Yavneh Academy is therefore extremely proud that six of its educators have been recognized for their innovative approaches to education, and have been selected to present at this year’s ISTE conference in San Antonio, Texas.
Chani Lichtiger, director of educational technology, and Claire Hirschhorn, technology integrator, will be presenting a session which demonstrates how to motivate students to learn about digital citizenship by having them teach their younger peers. The students accomplished this goal by creating interactive presentations using a variety of apps and sites such as Powtoon, Google Slides and BrainPOP Make-a-Movie to instruct the younger students on safe and acceptable uses of the internet. They shared these presentations during a “Digital Citizenship Fair,” during which the sixth graders taught third and fourth graders these important skills. This session is entitled “Using Project-Based Learning to Add Authenticity to a Digital Citizenship Curriculum.”
Technology Integrator Tova Burack, will present a session called “Animated Biology Projects: Creating Movies with Google Drawing and iMovie.” In this session, she shares how students created animated movies of cell mitosis. The students used Google Drawing to draw each stage of the cell during mitosis. Using these multiple Google drawings, they then created an animated movie using the iMovie application.
First grade teachers Rahel Grebler and Laya Levine’s session is called “Programming, Engineering and Robotics in a Dual-Language First Grade Classroom.” These teachers used the Kibo robot developed at Tufts University. They will share how they integrate robotics and the engineering process to enhance the learning in their classroom in both secular and Judaic studies. The students were taught to program their robots in both English and Hebrew. In social studies, Kibo robots were used by the children to learn about Native Americans and the rainforests. In science, the Kibos were programmed to re-enact animal behaviors such as migration and hibernation. In Judaic studies, students programmed using Hebrew to re-enact events such as Yom Yerushalayim and the Exodus from Egypt.
Fourth grade teacher, and literacy coach, Alison Landa, will be sharing “Lighting Up the World” during a hands-on playground session entitled “Full STEAM Ahead.” (STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) She will be joined by the creators of the 3Doodler pen, as she demonstrates how she used this innovative three dimensional pen to teach geography. The students used the pens to create three dimensional models of tourist attractions in the cities they studied.
These six Yavneh Academy educators look forward to sharing their successful and creative approaches to teaching with the nearly 20,000 educators who will attend this prestigious four day event. Yavneh Academy will be sending five other educators to this year’s ISTE conference. These eleven fortunate educators will bring back from ISTE valuable and cutting edge techniques, ideas and approaches that they will share with their colleagues, thereby ensuring that Yavneh Academy stays in the forefront of education as a future-ready school.
