It has been a Flipgrid week. My first-year students in the Oranim English Department made introductory videos. The students, taking their first steps in academia, presented themselves in English in ninety-second videos. Looking at their faces, hearing about their backgrounds, their hobbies, and their dreams of becoming teachers was a pleasure for me, but it was much more than that. In an a-synchronous higher education course, where I only met the students once in a large group on Zoom, this opportunity to see and hear them one by one at the beginning of the course was crucial. Through their Flipgrid videos, I ‘met’ the students as individuals, but just as…
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International practicum – another learning opportunity
When most teacher educators hear the concept ‘international practicum’, they imagine groups of pre-service teachers boarding a plane and travelling to experience teaching and learning in another country. Teaching faculty from their institution usually accompany them.Since I began my teaching at the Oranim College of Education, I have been involved in two small international practicum projects, and I am about to embark on a larger one. All of these experiences have involved online or local mentoring.My first international mentoring experience involved accompanying two third-year students from Oranim who were chosen to fly to Lucerne, Switzerland, to experience teaching in a high school there. They lived with Swiss families for a…
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Literacy Lockdown
Yesterday in the late afternoon, I received a request from the Oranim College spokesperson, asking me to write a short response to the Ministry of Education decision to place all grade one reading instruction on hold until schools reopen. The decision followed the widespread discussion in the media on the effectiveness of online reading instruction at the beginning of grade one. A news reporter from the top Israeli newspaper asked for the response and needed it very quickly. I sat down and spent an hour crafting a paragraph stating my opinion on the topic. Unfortunately, this morning I received an apology that they shortened the article, and that they cut out my response. While…
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Attending to the needs of (first-year) students
This morning I discovered the work of Sheila MacNeill through the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast and her blog, HOWSHEILASEESIT. Many issues were raised in the podcast entitled Time, Space, and Place and in the blog post entitled “The upside down and in-between: the uncertainity of where I am right now”. One of the topics that the two pieces share is the concern for all higher education students, and new students, first-year students in particular. In the podcast, Sheila explained: I think this whole notion of being a student and being a lecturer, actually just being at university or college just now, it’s changing… this goes back to time, I…
