Last night, I had the pleasure of hosting a prize-winning American author, Joan Leegant, at my end-of-semester meeting for faculty. We are grateful to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv for bringing Joan to the country and funding her work with our lecturers and students. What an exciting way to conclude one of our most challenging semesters. We met on Zoom to be inspired by Joan and to process our thoughts, emotions and memories in writing. Joan provided spectacular creative visuals and literary pieces as prompts. As a group, we observed unique, thought-provoking images and listened to beautiful poetry and song lyrics. In response, we took the time to reflect…
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Meet Nearpod: A game-changing tool for student engagement – EARLI 2023
Thessaloniki August 2023 This week I will be presenting at the 20th Biennial EARLI Conference, hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Macedonia, Greece. The conference theme is “Education as a Hope in Uncertain Times”. I will be presenting a 90-minute ICT demonstration and sharing my work with Nearpod interactive presentations. I will share all of the materials relevant to the presentation here and will share this post with the audience at the conference. My session is on Friday, August 25th, from 8:00 – 9:30. ICT DEMONSTRATION Meet Nearpod: A game-changing tool for student engagement Abstract In this hands-on, interactive techno-pedagogical demonstration, we will explore Nearpod, a…
- activities, Digital tools, Diversity, International collaboration, pre-service teachers, relational education, teacher-education
GatherEd: Learning and Creating Global Teacher Education
What does GatherEd mean to me? For the second time, GatherEd has provided an opportunity to halt the everyday race, always loaded with local worries, administration, tasks and surroundings, to zoom out of routine and into crucial issues from a different perspective. GatherEd means a chance to grapple with the complexity of education in a changing global reality, collaboratively unpacking terms like multiculturalism and multilingualism. GatherEd has given me the space to think about global teacher education, digital responsibility, inclusion, accessibility and democratic competencies alongside dedicated colleagues from Norway, Iceland, Greece, Spain and Israel. I am grateful for the invitation to attend my second GatherEd workshop at the University of…
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Stay on top of online learning: A game
Here is a game I made for my undergraduate students during the pandemic. As we moved rapidly to online teaching and learning, we spoke explicitly about independent learning strategies. I feel a need to return to this game now in my online courses. I made the game on the free LearningApps.org site. You can access the game here with the QR code. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you play or share the game with students.
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Bursting with pride! A moment of optimism.
It is easy to get depressed by the education provided in Israeli schools. There is a never-ending progression of Education Ministers who do not desire the job and are not interested in solving the long-term challenges. There is, for example, a severe lack of teachers; those that have remained in the system are burnt out and recovering from post-COVID distress. The classes are overcrowded, and educators, harshly underpaid and undervalued, suffer. Everyone complains about the academic level, the quality of instruction, the violence, and the lack of motivation at all levels. In the college, it is easy to focus on those pre-service teachers who are absent too often, who do…
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Nice to meet you: Letters and questionnaires for building relationships with students
Teaching and learning are relational processes; building significant relationships in large classes requires planning, time, and hard work. Showing genuine interest in who my students are as individuals is crucial in developing trust and a feeling of safety in my classroom. At the beginning of each academic semester, I make sure I allow my pre-service teacher students at the Oranim College of Education to introduce themselves to me in different ways. I devote most of the first lesson to an introductory letter in a few of my courses. In the past ten years or more, I have been following a strategy I learned from Professor Julian Kitchen from Brock University…
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Can you break the code? A quiet warm-up
Two of my didactics courses opened last week with the beginning of the 2022-2023 academic year. I began both lessons with a quiet activity which allowed the students to get seated, calm down, look around the room and get ready for the class in an easygoing fashion.I presented a message in code and asked the students to translate it into their notebooks. In the “Teaching English to Young Learners” course, they read a note from me in English, and in the “Literacy: Didactics for Hebrew Teaching” course, they read a quotation about language in Hebrew. While the students were reading the message, working alone or with a neighbour, I had…
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GatherED: Global Teacher Education “Languages as tools for developing global citizenship”
I am in a hotel in Crete writing to process an inspiring three-day inspiring workshop funded by the Erasmus + program. When I arrived in Rethymnon in Crete from Israel, I knew I would be participating in a GatherED international workshop about language education in multi-lingual and multi-cultural classroom environments. I immediately discovered that the learning was engrossing, and the powerful emotional connections with fellow participants extended well beyond any expectation. I flew to Rethymno with four Oranim College of Education colleagues. I knew Janina Kahn Horwitz, the head of my department, very well, but the others were only acquaintances. Representing the college together in an international context instantly bonded…
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One of my favourite digital tools – Quizizz
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“More than the calf wants to suck the cow wants to suckle”
It’s that time of year again – assignments, follow-ups, reminders, and grades. It’s the time of the year when I look at my Google Sheets for each course, fill in the grades from recent assessment tasks, and organise the data. This is often the period when it becomes evident that one or more students will fail the course. Nothing is a surprise here. Students who are behind or are at risk of failing have had numerous ‘nudges’ during the semester. They have had warnings that they are close to the attendance quota cut-off mark, can’t miss additional lessons, or have received emails that they haven’t submitted work. These messages always…
