The MOFET Institute's Online Academy is offering online courses in the didactics of teaching diverse disciplines. The courses, which are held in a range of languages including English, Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic, are intended for anyone who has an interest in teaching – teachers, teacher educators, researchers, policy makers, etc. We are delighted to invite you to an Open Day with the heads of the various programs. Join the scores of learners and graduates of the Academy's programs!

The holiday of Tu Bishvat begins this year on Friday evening, February 10th. As the Jewish holiday most closely connected to the environment and the natural world, Tu Bishvat provides a great opportunity for teachers to include earth and environmental science in their curriculum. This year, we were inspired by Jewish texts about the natural world. For each text, we’ve taken out a particular topic you can focus on in your classroom and provided educational technology resources that can help your students reach their learning goals. Our hope is that after using these tools and developing a stronger understanding of Earth, your students will have a more meaningful Tu Bishvat.

In the mid-1990s, a few dozen intrepid high school students enrolled in what were likely the first fully online high school courses. Fast forward twenty years later. It’s hard to think of students who take online courses as educational pioneers anymore. Taking an online course to fill a Biology, Math, or even Talmud credit seems run of the mill. After all, adults enroll in online courses all the time—to pass the DMV requirements, to learn how to use that new software for work, or to study Renaissance poetry in a MOOC. It’s only commonsensical that schools would harness this mode of teaching as well. In fact, over 2.2 million K-12 school students enroll in online courses annually. The vast majority of the students come from the public system, but hundreds of thousands of students from private and charter schools also enroll. Jewish day schools sign up their students as well, though on a smaller scale. While 4% of all American public school students take an online course, less than 1%t of Jewish day school students enroll in an online course for either General or Jewish Studies. Jewish day schools began experimenting with online learning less than a decade ago, and at this point, several thousand Jewish day school students participate in online learning courses every year. This number is steadily growing.

The rapid technological development in the last decade facilitates the integration of teaching and learning environments and tools into Seamless Learning outside of the classroom. Nowadays, the accessibility of knowledge anytime, anywhere breaches the traditional classroom borders and opens up many different learning possibilities via tools and applications for mobile learning, social networks, large-group learning environments, and so on. MOFET International invites you to an online seminar to be held during February 2017, in which we shall present theoretical, research-based, and applied aspects of environments and tools that are prevalent in the field today.

The present study aims to examine the impact of encounter between two different ethnic groups, Jews and Arabs, of Israeli first-year graduate students who study in four colleges of education, on the development of their intercultural competence: (1) knowledge regarding the “other,” (2) change in attitudes and behavior towards the other, and (3) multicultural educational practice. The findings point to two clear factors affecting the development of intercultural competence: the formal and informal college experience as reported by respondents, particularly the contents and tools that both Jews and Arabs acquired at the college in addition to personal characteristics and off-campus encounters.

The MOFET International Leadership Seminar in Israel for Jewish educators and community leaders (July 3-12, 2017) will deal with issues and models of Jewish leadership throughout the history of the Jewish people, up to the present time, examining the participants' management and leadership styles and helping them promote community leadership in the roles they are currently performing or will perform in the future.