By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
These days it is an act of sheer determination —engaging students across the country who arrive at afterschool Hebrew and Judaic Studies classes each week absorbed in tweets, text messages, and the latest iPhone apps. In the hopes of helping teachers shrink the “tech” divide in the classroom, the National Association of Temple Educators, an organization associated with the Reform movement, will meet at the swanky and sophisticated W Hotel in downtown Seattle starting on Jan. 30 for its annual conference,
“The world of education is changing so dramatically, from moment to moment, that the experience of youth growing up today is fundamentally shifted,” Beth Young, one of several certified Reform Jewish education directors and conference co-chairs told JTNews from her home in Coral Gables, Fla., where she is the director of education at Temple Judea. Young has been associated with NATE for the last nine years.
“We no longer live in age where the teacher is the person who has knowledge and imparts that knowledge to students,” said Young. “The role of the educator becomes one of helping students navigate information. It’s much more of a coaching-modeling role.”
The NATE staff who organized this year’s conference, titled “Imagineering Jewish Education in the 21st Century,” used conference calls and online Webinars, where co-chairs and committee members throughout the United States met weekly in a chat room online to firm up conference details.
A pre-conference, one-day “boot camp” will give education directors, day school teachers, and regional education representatives who don’t feel completely comfortable with technology a chance to have some hands-on experience with the basics. Darim Online, a national company that provides technical solutions for Jewish organizations, will facilitate.
Still, NATE executive director Rabbi Stanley Schickler cautions that Jewish educators shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
“I believe that the use of technology definitely has the potential to attract Jewish youth to Jewish learning,” Schickler told JTNews via e-mail, “but technology is only ‘the hook.’ If there is no substance behind the technology, then I don’t believe that the youth will stay.”
Rabbi Melissa Buyer, a NATE board member, conference co-chair, and the director of religious school, youth and camp programs at Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles, Calif., told JTNews that more technology in the Jewish classroom really can forge increased bonds with today’s students and their parents.
Buyer implemented a digital report card system at her temple with digital weekly parent updates, and a 4th grade distance learning program called iLearn, where students spend one day a week at the school, and one day in a session via a Webinar chat room.
“Many of our students have not known life without technology and it is relevant and ever-present in the lives of the next generation of Jewish learners,” Buyer said. “While I don’t believe technology is the magic bullet,’ I do believe technology can help us rethink and reshape Jewish education and perhaps community.”
“I think people are being pushed by what’s going on with the kids because it is their world and we’re responding to their reality,” said Elizabeth Fagin, a longtime supplementary school teacher who served as director of education at Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue for nearly 10 years. She said she had to switch her own communication strategies to students when she realized that kids just don’t read e-mail anymore.
“I started texting them,” Fagin said. “If I was a director today, I would be using Facebook or tweeting them.”
Locally, more than 20 education directors will be attending the conference, thanks to a $2,000 grant from the planning and community services department of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Education directors from Temple Beth Am, B’nai Torah, Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation, and Temple Beth Hatfiloh in Olympia are registered.
So how can congregations afford to upgrade their classrooms, make laptop computers and the Internet available to students, and compete with some of the best Jewish Web sites out there, like JewishRockRadio.com, where music becomes a teaching tool?
“The fact of the matter is that most of our students carry smart phones, and have small computers on their person,” Buyer said. “It’s time to move away from labs [and ask], ‘What more could we be doing with mobile technology?’ That really doesn’t cost us anything except for the training of our faculty.”
Fagin agreed.
“It doesn’t require that classrooms have technology,” she said. “You can provide homework experiences with their families, in the library, or in their schools, and send kids on Web searches.”
Largely, NATE conference organizers want the conference educators that attend to leave Seattle with something — any part of a program they interact with here that they can bring back to their schools and teach their teachers.
“It’s a way of stretching the day and asking, ‘How can we expand the day by utilizing technology that students and families are already using 24/7,’” Young said. “We need to start to think of students’ cell phones as tools instead of distractions.”