I did it. I finally took myself to a Hava Nashira workshop at OSRUI. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I’ve heard my husband talk about it - and about the awesome people he met there - for so many years that it was time for me to go. And our younger daughter Allie went two years ago and was planning to go back this year, so I figured it would be a great opportunity to bond with her.
I had a great time. I was incredibly humbled by what I don’t know about music (which is everything), inspired by what I learned, and spiritually uplifted in a really nice way. It was amazing that everyone at work told me how rested I looked, after spending 4 nights eating camp food and sleeping in camp beds (and staying up way too late).
So now I’m determined to learn to drum the djembe!
CAJE 33 is just around the corner. I know - we just finished clearing snow off the driveway (really - I live in Chicago), and I’m focused on August 10-14 already. Oh, I know we have a college graduation to attend in May (our last - goodbye tuition) and a wedding to make in July (our first - way worse than tuition), but my sights are set on August in Vermont!
My school is a grantee of the Avi Chai Foundation’s Educational Technology grant. I wasn’t able to attend their one-day program, but I did prepare a video of the project.
Here in Israel and around the Jewish world, we are preparing to mark the celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary.
At Neveh Channah Girl’s HS in the Etzion Bloc, we wanted to encourage our students to give expression to different aspects of Israel (history, geography, way of life, settlement, etc.). We decided to teach our tenth grade classes how to create Animoto video clips with stills and music. Animoto allows creating free clips of up to 30 seconds. The girls had to choose a topic, locate relevant images, create text slides, choose suitable music, create the clip and embed it in the blog we had created for this purpose.
The result was an exhibit with over four pages of clips and reflections (in Ivrit) dealing with topics such as the Western Wall, Israel’s Prime Ministers, Sderot, Jerusalem vs. Tel Aviv, Our soldiers. Israeli youth, Israel’s coasts, etc. Please come and visit and leave comments.
I subscribe to many blogs using iGoogle as a news reader. It’s a real time saver because I can easily see which of my favorite blogs have new entries. With one glance - at one web page - I can see all the new post titles and click on them to read the entire post.
The blog entries show up much better if you give your post a title. If you skip past the title field your blog post shows up as a blank line. Then there’s nothing for your reader to click on; you have to go to the blog to find the post. It’s just one more step for the reader and the more steps there are, the less likely your blog will be read.
iGoogle is an example of an RSS reader. For more information about RSS, go to Common Craft’s website.
I’m sure you’ve received emails telling you to go to such-and-such site to click to ensure that some corporation will donate money to breast cancer research, food for homeless pets, etc. Today I got one that read:
Friends & Family,
In an effort to raise money for research on autism, the band, Five for Fighting, is generously donating $0.40 to Autism Speaks for *each time* the video is viewed on the attached link. When you have a moment, please visit the link below to watch the video and pass it along to your friends and family. They are aiming for 10,000 hits, but hopefully we can help them to surpass this goal.
But - and this is lovely, just lovely - anyone can create and upload a video on the topic of “what kind of world do you want?” Imagine - plain old people just making videos about their vision of the world and what it can be, posting them online, sending them out to their friends and families, and raising money for charity at the same time.
Why, I feel a class project cooking up.
I spent a few minutes checking out the videos on the site (there are currently 183). Many are about people living with autism, ALS, and Asberger’s Syndrome and the effect on their families. One is about war’s effect on children (okay, I cried). The cool thing is that while I’m raising money for charity, I’m also learning the human side of these charities and the people they help.
What an awesome class project: pick one of the designated charities, make a video, raise money.
Debbie Harris is the technology coordinator at the Sager Solomon Schechter Middle School in Northbrook, IL and teaches religious school at Lakeside Congregation for Reform Judaism. Involved in Jewish education for over thirty years, she received an education degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in instructional media. She is skilled in using and teaching desktop publishing, video editing, presentation and animation software; and consults and presents regularly on integrating technology into Judaic studies. Her students podcast, blog, edit video and create claymations. She is co-chairing the technology track for the upcoming CAJE 33 in Vermont.
She has been married to David Harris, a Jewish educator and cantorial soloist, for almost 30 years and has two daughters, Allie and Lori. Allie is an avid Facebooker and student at the University of Illinois (who took off a semester to do an internship at DisneyWorld - and blogged here). Lori is an English teacher at Mundelein High School and blogs here.
When not learning, teaching or writing about technology, Debbie likes to craft. While not particularly highly skilled at anything, she likes to knit, do calligraphy, sew, paint fabric and just generally play with fun toys like scrapbooking supplies, watercolors, and anything with texture.
She is the creator/manager/primary poster of TorahTech, the Ning social network for Jewish educators passionate about integrating technology.
Debbie Harris is the technology coordinator at the 
