As you can see, the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School will surely remember this Chanukah season for years to come! In addition to celebrating the joy of the holiday season and fulfilling the mitzvah of giving back to those in need, this will be the Chanukah that marks our school’s next step on the journey of 21st century learning. This is the moment that the last few years of cutting-edge experimentation and (sometimes) lonely trailblazing begins to pay off in tangible, real-world ways. There have been signs along the way, perhaps edJEWcon being the most significant, because that was the first clear and direct signal that the world of education was paying attention to what our Jewish day school in Jacksonville was doing – a minor miracle in its own right! But with this week’s announcement, our school takes another, perhaps more significant leap into the future.
21st century learning just got real y’all.
In July, I blogged the following:
And I have been recently working with Nicky Newfield, Director of Jewish Interactive, on potential new projects. Although I have no groundbreaking program or initiative to announce at present…I am quite confident that all this thinking and collaboration will yield exciting fruit, and soon.
You can read the entire blog post, here. And although from July to December, some of the details have shifted, the big idea remains intact. Allow me to refresh you…
The last three years in my position as Head of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, a K-8 Schechter Network Day School of nearly 130 students located in Jacksonville, Florida, has overlapped with an explosion of interest in 21st century learning and educational technology. In large ways, our school has been shaped by the works of leading figures in this educational movement – Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Alan November, Mike Fischer, and Chris Lehmann to name just a few. And in small ways, I believe our school has contributed to the movement as well, by serving as a living laboratory and our creation of edJEWcon – a yearly institute for 21st century Jewish day school education, launched in 2012 with 21 Jewish Day Schools throughout North America and representing the full ideological spectrum. As our work in this area deepens each year, new opportunities for innovation arise. It has become to clear to us that gaming and gaming theory represent the next frontier.
A leading feature of 21st century learning is giving students the opportunities to own the learning. Knowing that Bloom’s Taxonomy recognizes “creativity” as the highest rung on 
the ladder, we are interested in giving our students opportunities to create meaningful, authentic work. From a motivational standpoint, gaming provides us with a tangible example of our target audience spending hours upon hours failing to achieve! But rather than becoming despondent, kids find this kind of failure motivating – they will spend hours and days working on new skills and seeking new discoveries in order to accomplish their goal. Deep gaming allows for the possibility of harnessing students’ desire for creativity and motivation for success to the curricular aims of a school.
Although this would apply to any aspect of the curriculum, it is in Middle School Jewish Studies where perhaps the greatest opportunity lies. It could be because the current quality of curricular materials is less. It could be because student motivation for Jewish Studies is oftentimes less in, at least, some kinds of Jewish day schools. It could be that for some students virtual Jewish experiences may the only Jewish experiences (outside of school) available. For those reasons, and for the benefits of creating integrated curricular learning experiences between secular academics, STEM and Jewish Studies that many Jewish Day Schools find desirable either for expediency, mission or both, we believe the creation of a virtual gaming environment built around Jewish studies has the greatest academic and commercial potential.
And that leads me to this week’s exciting announcement. Our work with Jewish Interactive and with Rabbi Tal Segal in particular, led to today’s exciting press release. Again, you may read the whole post here, but allow me to quote below.
We are pleased to announce that Jewish Interactive will be embarking on a joint project with the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School of Jacksonville, Florida, where students will be designing from the ground up an educational Chanukah video game. Jewish Interactive will actually build the software, to be released in advance of next Chanukah for use in their current network to more than 50 elementary schools around the world.
In this jointly planned and executed cross-curricular project, MJGDS students will first learn about the software development cycle and form project teams, each receiving a specific role, e.g.:
Project manager
Content expert
Instructional designer
Gaming expert
Graphic artist
Programmer
Animator
Sound effects
Students will research and gather the Jewish content to be included in their game, develop a curriculum and learning objectives, script an instructional game design, and develop characters and graphics. Every step of the process will be supported and guided by the team and educators at MJGDS and the Jewish Interactive team.
The MJGDS team has been a leader of innovation and entrepreneurship in the field, and a strong voice of change and advancement, most noticeably through their edJEWcon initiative, a conference for Jewish schools and institutions on 21st century teaching and learning, and the cross-curricular use of technology in their own school, sharing Jewish Interactive’s vision.
Jewish Interactive is thrilled to embark on this joint initiative with MJGDS and to pioneer the involvement of students at the very core of the learning experience.
Did you see their faces in the opening video? Do you think those students will be excited to learn in years to come? Do you think their motivation to excel academically will be at its highest?
In this Chanukah season, we’re betting “yes” and have pushed all our gelt to the middle of the table. A great miracle happened there…but we have miracles up our sleeves right here in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate as well.
Chag Chanukah Sameach!
