September 14 | Jewish Portal of Teacher Education

Sep. 14, 2016

Dear subscriber,

MOFET JTEC Portal Newsletter

Dear Subscriber,

We are delighted to send you the latest issue of The MOFET JTEC Portal resource listing.

The current bulletin contains handy resources for the High Holidays season, information items about educational tourism to Israel and Eastern Europe, cutting edge educational technology and much more.

We are happy to share with you Debbie Harris' account of the birth of Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago's new Innovation Studio Space.

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.

In that regard, we would like to invite you to our Online Open Days with the heads of our various online programs and courses. Here we will try to answer any questions you may have on the Online Academy: the nature of distance learning, course contents and structure, and requirements, as well as costs, registration options, payment, certificates, and accreditation.

Wishing you a wonderful and productive New Year,
Reuven Werber

The MOFET JTEC Portal Team

September 14, 2016

Jewish Portal of Teacher Education

Please note: a complete list of recent additions to the portal follows the Featured Items.

September 2016

Featured Items

NewCAJE Tishrei Resource Book

At NewCAJE 7 in Naperville, Illinois, two workshop blocks were devoted to the teaching of the Tishrei holidays with more of an emphasis on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur than on Sukkot. The calendar often gives educators an opportunity to teach Sukkot during the holiday, if not before it, but the High Holidays often are not taught or taught sparsely, and usually not systematically. This year, we are most fortunate that the High Holidays come much later in the fall — beginning as they do at the very beginning of October. NewCAJE wants to make available to you all of the workshops from the two workshop blocks and their content. The presenters were asked to write up their workshops so that someone who did not attend their session also could benefit from them. They were asked to include full stories, links to music, etc., so that everything here would be available to you and easy to access for your teaching.

Pardes Brings Together Teachers across Denominations to Tackle Tefilah Crisis in Schools

At the start of the summer vacation, twenty four teachers, spanning grades 2-12, across denominations and from throughout the U.S., participated in the Aleinu Leshabe’ach II: Conference on Tefilah in Jewish Day Schools. The five-day conference, run by the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators (PCJE) with support from the AVI CHAI Foundation, aimed to work with teachers on the front lines who are seeking ways to make tefilah (prayer) more meaningful in their schools.

Expanding Frontiers and Affirming Belonging: Youth Travel to Israel - A View from Latin America

By looking at the different youth trips as part of the educational system and organizational order of Jewish life, this article sheds light on the significance that factors such as institutional density, social capital and communal legacy have on the nature and scope of these trips, their character, time extent and goals. It incorporates a regional perspective in order to examine the varying array of youth trips amidst an increasingly interconnected Jewish world. For this purpose, several characteristics of Jewish life in Latin America are underscored in a comparative perspective; highlighting the role Zionism and Israel have played as identity referents and community builders, in order to approach the differentiated nature of the trips. The related cognitive and existential dimension s associated with the trips’ experiences are central factors in the socializing process of youth. Israel becomes the territorial and symbolic space in which strong and durable collective bonds are expected to develop, though the goals and natures of the various trips themselves may vary.

The New Innovation Studio Space at Schechter Chicago

Debbie Harris, Educational Technology Director at Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago, shares with us her dream learning space and its realization – The Innovation Studio Space which greeted the Schechter staff and students the beginning of this school year. We learn how the school community took to the Studio and what might happen as the school year moves on.

Educational Resources for Rosh HaShana 2016

Jacob Richman has posted on his website 70 links to materials about Rosh Hashana, ranging from laws and customs to games and recipes, as well as RH greeting cards, in English, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Portugese, Russian and Spanish. The site also contains a Rosh HaShana Photo Gallery with a rich selection.

September 2016

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