[conf] Three Social Media Trainings for Jewish Educators
This past Monday, January 18, Barry Joseph and I got the opportunity to conduct three intensive trainings for Jewish educators in Teaneck, New Jersey. The occasion was the "Jewish Day School Leadership Conference" which brought together some 500 jewish educators from 300 different institutions to the Marriot in Teaneck. It was a really interesting experience and exposure to the unique educational setting of Jewish day schools.
Our first training was a roundtable discussion with a dozen early childhood educators and directors, specifically focused on how they can use social media to better serve the community of teachers, parents and young children they support. It was a very dynamic and free-ranging discussion about various social media and social networking tools, touching on several of the practical, ethical, and programmatic challenges of using these technologies in a school setting. Rather than simply lecture them on what Global Kids has done, Barry and I did our best to lead a discussion about how to navigate these tools themselves and come up with strategies that they themselves can implement after the workshop.
It was a really fun way to start the day.
Immediately after our first training, Barry and I conducted a training called "Games-based Learning 101," which was attended by about 20 participants. We gave them a quick exposure to the main elements of games-based learning as an educational framework, but then quickly launched into an interactive demo of the Global Kids' youth-created game "Ayiti: the Cost of Life." A few them had already used the game in their classrooms, so this wasn't so hard for them to imagine using in a school setting.
Then we had the participants divide up into groups and play the "Grow-A-Game" card game developed by Tilt Factor. The groups enjoyed coming up with game concepts linked to different social values. I thought the different game concepts were quite creative and elaborate, given the constrained time frame.
Finally we left them with links to several free online and downloadable game-design programs, and a flyer with several resources for exploring education and games further.
Our last session of the day was on "Social Media and Constructionist Learning," and was our most challenging. Clearly these educators had been already fired up about social media, because our small conference room was packed with 50-some participants.
Of the suite of tools that we presented, the most popular one was clearly comic creation. Several of them saw comics as a very flexible and creative tool for getting young people to learn and demonstrate various subjects in a new way. So we spent a good bit of time talking about the various free comic creation tools that are out there.
We also covered such technologies as blogs, videos, wikis, online maps, shared documents, and social bookmarking. Throughout the presentation Barry and I made it clear that the point was not to jump onto whatever was the hottest technology, but to see what the educational needs are of the youth you are serving, and what tools can help you to meet those needs.
For more information about how Global Kids can help your institution to use digital media to better serve your constituents, check the professional services section of our website.
