History is How We Write It

A few weeks ago there was a lengthy article in the New York Time Sunday Magazine about the Texas Board of Education and its influence on textbook publishers.  The debates and hearings are now over, and the new Texas standards are now in place.
Publishers will now respond to the new standards by publishing textbooks that align to them - Texas is a huge market and the publishers need to sell their books.

I hope this will encourage educators to seek sources for their students that reflect appropriate perspectives, even if those are not reflected in the available textbooks.  That is one of the advantages (and yes, challenges as well) of the enormous amount and diversity of information available to us today.  Please click on this blog from the ASCD Smartbrief about learning in today's world.  What is true about students in the general educational world is true in the Jewish educational world as well.

And to remember that - as I wrote on February 24, 2010 in a post about Purim -the lens through which we understand history is even more important than the accumulated facts that we have about it.

Twitter in Teaching?

Many years ago, when CAJE was a young organization, I went to my first CAJE conference.  Returning home I could hardly wait to share the innovative ideas that surfaced there with the principals and teachers in my congregational school.  I still remember the response of the principal:
"Who needs Alternatives to Jewish Education?" he asked.
I corrected him.
"It was the Conference on Alternatives IN Jewish Education," I said.
I'm not sure I convinced him.

We've come a long way, I hope, in looking at innovation in learning.  One example is a website, jlearn2.0 which highlights leading-edge thinking in this area.

I want to recommend you read this post at jlearn2.0 entitled Why My Students Were Texting in Class... and Learning.  It is an exciting window into use of what might be seen as distractions to advance learning.  We need to use all the tools available to engage our students.