Getting Ready for edJEWcon 5773.1

Who was the smart guy who didn’t build a travel day into this year’s Passover Break?

This guy!

It has been quite a short week recovering from Passover and preparing for a tremendous amount of important events and programs to bring us from now through the end of another terrific year at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  We are engaged in annual parent and faculty surveys.  We are finalizing financial aid decisions.  We have many important and exciting Jewish holidays to celebrate and experience.  Our Middle School is off next week to Washington, D.C.  We will have standardized testing to analyze and disseminate.  We will have a graduation.  We have our annual L’Dor V’Dor spring event (save the date coming soon!).  We have a faculty to hire and new students to enroll.  We have a gaming project to embark upon and we are just opening up our K-2 digital portfolios to sit alongside our existing 3-8 blogfolios.

Needless to say, there is plenty to do!

And smack dab in the middle of it all comes edJEWcon 5773.1!

Thanks again to the generosity of the AVI CHAI Foundation and the support of the Schechter Day School Network we will again welcome over 100 participants representing schools, agencies, foundations and universities from all over North American and Israel who are coming to Jacksonville, Florida to learn, reflect, share and co-create the future of Jewish day school education.  Want to get excited?  Check this out.

Want to get excited if you are not a Jewish educator, but care about education?

Even with the difficulty in scheduling between Jewish holidays, we are thrilled to not only have great turnout, but we have changed the conference from last year to this in a few important ways:

• Requests for presentation were offered and we received back more than enough high-quality proposals to allow edJEWcon to be a conference by the field for the field.
• We have built in reflection and collaboration to ensure the conference is simply the beginning of an ongoing conversation about teaching and learning.
• We closed school on the Monday so that our faculty can more fully participate and benefit from the conference.
• We have expanded our outreach to ensure that Chris Lehmann’s Keynote: “Building School 2.0 Creating the Schools We Need” is well attended by our local school community as well our larger Jewish and educational community here in Jacksonville.
• Working with DSLTI, we will have a post-edJEWcon experience focused on leading cultural change in a 21st century learning organization facilitated by Jonathan Cannon.

So much gratitude and thanks goes to our 21st Century Learning Team who does the bulk of the conference preparation.  Thanks to all the students, teachers, parents and stakeholders at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School whose hard work allows us to host an edJEWcon.  Extra thanks to those MJGDS teachers who are presenting this year!  Much thanks to Karin Hallett and Silvia Tolisano for innumerable hours of work.  Extra special thanks to Andrea Hernandez who steers the ship and who will very deservingly be giving the opening keynote.

We have a lot of work to do over the next three weeks to ensure edJEWcon’s success.  But it is inspiring to know that the future of Jewish education is happening now…and it is happening here.

Stay tuned!

Author: Jon Mitzmacher

Dr. Jon Mitzmacher is the Head of the Ottawa Jewish Community School. Jon is studying to be a rabbi at the Academy for Jewish Religion and is on the faculty of the Day School Leadership Training Institute (DSLTI) as a mentor. He was most recently the VP of Innovation for Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools.  He is the former Executive Director of the Schechter Day School Network.  He is also the former head of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, a K-8 Solomon Schechter, located in Jacksonville, FL, and part of the Jacksonville Jewish Center.  He was the founding head of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Las Vegas.  Jon has worked in all aspects of Jewish Education from camping to congregations and everything in between. View all posts by Jon Mitzmacher