This is a very exciting weekend!
Our Kindergarten has its annual Shabbat Service & Dinner this evening. First Grade has its annual Consecration tomorrow morning during Shabbat services. In our local community, we will be participating in Federation’s annual Super Sunday (click here for more info). The DuBow Preschool will be hosting a Magic Bubble Science Show & Open House that morning as well (click here for more info). And I am off to Washington D.C on Sunday for the North American Jewish Day School Conference (click here for more info). I will surely be Tweeting and blogging from the conference and will just as likely make it the subject of my blog post next week. One highlight (and opportunity) comes Monday morning when I will be offering a Dvar Torah and introduction of Heidi Hayes Jacobs (click here for more info). If you are available at about 8:45 AM (EST) that Monday, look for a tweet with a link to participate in a crowd-sourcing experiment. The more participation the better!
And of course I will be avidly rooting for my San Francisco 49ers to bring home the sixth Super Bowl of my lifetime! Go Niners!
That’s what’s coming up.
Today, I want to take one last look back at the third element of our MJGDS EdCamp that I have not yet shared. I blogged about the big idea, here. I blogged about the introduction of our new Learning Target, here. I blogged about the EdCamp sessions, here. But the middle of our day was one of those astounding moments where you see hopes and dreams come to life right in front of your eyes. Watching our teachers deliver their hatzatot was like watching a child take their first steps or graduate college – it crystalized and validated in a very powerful way the path our school is walking down. It was actually quite emotional; I told a colleague that we should just pack it in and go home – it couldn’t possibly get any better! Now that they are all posted on YouTube, I want to celebrate the work these amazing teachers did by ensuring they are seen by as many people as possible. But first, a recap…
הצתה (“Hatzatah”= Ignition) is our adaptation of a popular presentation format based
on Pecha Kucha and Ignite. Each presenter has 5 minutes to share their idea, broken down into 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Each MJGDS Faculty Meeting begins with a hatzatah. We find it a fantastic way to get our faculty to fulfill the moral imperative of sharing in a 21st century modality. To celebrate and inspire our faculty to make more and better use of iPads in the classroom, we decided to host a Hatzatah Contest on the theme of “How has the use of iPads impacted my professional practice?” The presentations took place during lunch on our EdCamp.
We found three interesting educators who agreed to be judges for our contest. They were Mike Fischer, Lisa Johnson (AKA “Techchef4u) who is a great curator of educational iPad content and Richard Byrne, famous in the edublogger world for his “Free Tech For Teachers” blog and who has recently started an iPad in ed blog. We videotaped each hatzatah and shared the videos, along with the above rubric, with our judges. The winner was awarded an iPad and each participant was awarded an iTunes gift card.
But the judges found it awfully hard to decide because they were quite amazing…don’t believe me? Then take 25 minutes (turn the volume up) and see for yourselves!
I know, right? They were extraordinarily good. But the judges did identify a winner…who do you think it was?
