HaYidion: Cover of the iSchool issue
Our middle school students are growing up in a world much different than the one their teachers grew up in. Theirs is a world of cellphones, iPods, and Wiis. It’s a world where technology is woven through their most favorite activities. This reality led us to wonder how we could bring that technology into the classroom and move the study of Zionism into the students’ wired world.
Last year, we were awarded a technology grant from the AVI CHAI Foundation for a Promethean board which would allow us to recreate our eighth grade Zionism course, providing a technology dimension that would add to student learning through visual and interactive media. We selected Promethean, which has capacities similar to Smart and other whiteboards, because of its user community (Promethean Planet), an online tool with resources, lessons, and discussion groups for all Promethean users. The Zionism course explores the people and events that led to the creation of the state and tracks the next sixty-two years.
The addition of an interactive board has enabled the students to better understand Israeli history with the addition of maps, video, and audio clips. Interactive websites and educational programs serve as tools for engaged learning. Imagine learning about the UN vote for the Partition Plan in 1947 and hearing and seeing it happen right before your eyes! In addition to these features we also have polling devices to use with the board. This feature allows students to individually answer questions posed by the teacher through a small pod. Beginning a lesson with a review quiz of the past week’s lessons is both fun for students because of the novel technology employed, and useful for the teacher to see what material has been grasped and what needs to be reviewed. It also allows students to voice opinions about decisions to be made and project “what happens next” in a dramatic historic moment.
The addition of a Promethean board in the classroom has been valuable not only because of its technology; it also addresses the needs of diverse student learning profiles through its visual and interactive components. Students have enthusiastically welcomed this use of technology in our classroom. A future task will be assessing student learning in this version of the course in comparison with student learning in the pre-technology version of the course and interpreting the results. Stay tuned.
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