Introducing a New Partnership and (drumroll, please…) jbop!

Looking for computer-based Jewish educational materials that actually… educate?

Are your students itching for educational software that’s not hokey and corney, but… cool and fun?

Does your school require technology that’s… easy to use?

Torah Aura Productions is teaming up with JeMM Productions, developers of fine technological Judaica, to bring you jbop 3.0, the next generation of computer-based curricular materials.

jbop is an innovative enrichment tool (“interactive activity center”) for use on computers in Jewish schools and homes. It’s a set of modules — each with six full interactive activity areas — on subjects from Pesah and Purim to Israel and Torah.

Best of all, jbop…

…represents the latest in technology-based education. It was developed by a team of top-notch Jewish educators in Israel and the United States, underwent research and development funded by the Covenant Foundation, and has already been successfully integrated into schools nationwide.

…is highly interactive, cool and fun. The jbop activity center features activities that let students animate their own Bible scenes, sing along with jewish music karaoke (and email sound clips to friends!), and play a variety of state-of-the-art games.

…is highly intuitive, simple to use, and easy to install. Using jbop doesn’t require you to distribute CDs or mess with the access settings of your personal firewall (you don’t even need to know what a personal firewall is!). No configuring. No technological gobbledygook. Just software that works. Just download, install, type in your access code, and you’re ready to rock-and-roll.

jbop 3.0 will be beta testing in May, and will be ready for full school and home deployment soon thereafter.

But you don’t have to wait. For a limited time, Torah Aura and JeMM are offering the jbop Yom Ha’Atzmaut Activity Pack free of charge. This special Israel@60 offer includes all of jbop’s Israel lessons, and as an added bonus, you’ll also receive the Welcoming Shabbat Activity Pack.

To try out jbop today, get the free download at http://www.ejemm.com/jemm/israelat60.htm.

Questions about jbop? Check the TAPBB jbop FAQ.

What is jbop?

What is jbop?
jbop is an innovative enrichment tool (“interactive activity center”) for use on computers in Jewish schools and homes. It’s a set of modules — each with six full interactive activity areas — on subjects from Pesah and Purim to Israel and Torah.

Who developed jbop?
JeMM Productions, makers of The Interactive Haggadah, Who Stole Hanukkah?!, Portrait of Israel, and other popular interactive multimedia products. The Covenant Foundation supported enhancements to the tool and effectiveness testing within focus schools (conducted jointly by JeMM and the Colorado Agency for Jewish Education).

Who uses jbop?
The jbop suite of tools is ideal for day schools and supplementary schools, either in the school computer lab or for assigned home use.

What age students can use jbop?
jbop is designed for first through fifth graders.

What’s special about jbop?
When your school integrates jbop into the curriculum, you’re adding a set of interactive activities — engaging, creative, varied, flexible — which accommodate a wide range of content and offer students and educators new modes of Jewish learning.

What content is covered?
Holidays and Shabbat; Bible; Values; Israel; Prayer (25 units in all)

How much time is needed for each jbop unit?
Activities are entirely modular and non-linear. You can spend anywhere from 20 minutes on a unit (doing two or three activities) to over an hour (covering four to six activity areas).

How are teachers trained to use jbop?
With jbop on your computer and the jbop Educator’s Guide in hand, a teacher can master the basics in two hours. For schools interested in large-scale deployment of the system, jbop — like everything else from Torah Aura Productions — comes with free teacher training and school support. For more information on teacher training, contact Josh Barkin, director of school services, at josh@torahaura.com.

Can I sample jbop?
For a limited time, Torah Aura and JeMM are offering the jbop Yom Ha’Atzmaut Activity Pack free of charge. This special Israel@60 offer includes all of jbop’s Israel lessons, and as an added bonus, you will also receive the Welcoming Shabbat Activity Pack.

To try out jbop today, get the free download at http://www.ejemm.com/jemm/israelat60.htm.

How I can buy jbop for my school?
Starting in May, jbop will be available from Torah Aura Productions. Stay tuned to this space for more information.

Introducing Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter

Ready for a completely new way of teaching Israel artzeinu?

Welcome to Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter.

Not just a travel book, Artzeinu is an insider’s guide to the people, history, and culture of Israel.

Designed for 5th and 6th grade, it’s a book that teaches more than geography, an encounter that goes into the heart and nature of Israeli life. This is not just a tour book, but an exploration of the essence of Israel.

Here’s how it works.

Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter is organized geographically, but it goes several steps further by using places in Israel to tell stories, meet Israelis, and grapple with the challenges of Medinat Yisrael:

Want to make Israel engaging and exciting? Give your students 3D glasses.

In honor of Israel’s 60th birthday (and the upcoming publication of Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter) we’re going to be taking some space in the TAPBB to talk about some real Israel issues. This is the second in a series of essays about how Israel fits into the school curriculum.

by Joel Lurie Grishaver

This week, we’re announcing the publication of a new kind of Israel textbook, Artzeinu: An Israel Encounter.

We’re proud of it because it’s beautiful, filled with gorgeous pictures of eretz Yisrael and amazing maps drawn by a master cartographer. We’re also proud of the activities in the book, and of its ease of use.

But we’re most proud of the fact that it presents a three-dimensional look at Israel.

Recently, I wrote about teaching the “real” Israel with an Israel curriculum that has to do two things. First it has to model love for Israel through the way it covers the subject. This is not a social studies text; it is a family history. Second, one must admit that Israel struggles with problems.

Teaching the real Israel is challenge enough. But we also deal with another problem. How do we make Israel—a country thousands of miles away and a world apart from our North American Jewish selves—engaging, interesting, and exciting for our students?

Shoah Art Can Be a Transformative Experience

by Laurie Bellet

With the sound of typewriter keys in the background, a group of students clustered in front of an ‘in progress’ mural, trying to determine how they will find space for the 669 luggage tags they need to incorporate. Metaphors for the rescued children they represent, it is crucial to the integrity of the work, that each tag find a suitable ‘home.’ This is the current experience of my Shoah elective class. Basing their work on the DVD “The Power of Good,” the class artists are studying the efforts of Sir Nicky Winton who, as a 29 year-old British businessman, in 1939, engineered the successful rescue of 669 Czechoslovakian, Jewish children.

Every year, I facilitate a class of middle school students who use art as the vehicle through which they study the Holocaust. Using art in this manner is a powerful learning experience. When students are younger, I prefer to use stories with an art experience as the hands on component. After reading and discussing The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco, my elementary students create butterflies decorated to demonstrate story comprehension. My older elementary students struggle to recreate the visa symbol, written by rescuer Chiune Sugihara and chronicled in the book Passage to Freedom. Combining the two themes by placing the visa symbol on a butterfly is particularly striking. Other books that provide wonderful templates for elementary Shoah art include The Lily Cupboard, Flowers on the Wall and Best Friends. Children who are students of the Shoah from a young age, are able to handle more intense work, such as recreating the artwork made by the youngsters in Theresienstadt who studied with artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis as described in the book Fireflies in the Night.

Let Me Count the Ways: Jewish websites for Jewish teachers

by Carol Oseran Starin

If you’re an avid web browser always looking for the coolest stuff online, reading today’s column may take hours. So make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, and get yourself a glass of water.

I asked our 5 Things Advisory Group to send me a list of their favorite Jewish websites. I had such a good time exploring the sites they sent in. Every one is a resource or tool that every Jewish teacher should know about. They’ve done the work, and you get to reap the benefits. Enjoy!

The Consortium for the Jewish Family Conference within a Conference at CAJE

Looking for a way to learn more about working with Jewish families? Here’s your chance. Be a participant in the Consortium for the Jewish Family Conference, a “conference-within-the-conference” program at CAJE 33 in Burlington, Vermont, August 10-13.

It doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or have attended dozens of family education trainings before. Here are some of the details we know.

The faculty will include Vicky Kelman, Jo Kaye, Shellie Dickstein, Marc Margolius. Peretz Wolf-Prusan, Ron Wolfson, Bruce Whizin, Phil Warmflash and Joel Lurie Grishaver.

Tracks (the major part of the day) will include: Early Engagement; The Jewish Family and the Case for Diversity: Where Do We Go From Here?; Still Crazy After All These Years: Tackling Challenging Subjects in Teen Jewish Family Education; Changing Vision of the Family in Synagogue; Outside the Four Walls; Training in Working with Families to Prevent Addiction; and Advance Family Programming.

The guest teacher list will include: Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Beit T’shuvah; Nigel Savage, Hazon; Amichai Lau-Lavie, Storahtelling; Steven M. Cohen, HUC JIR; Mike Cumins (Torah Trek) & Neli Simhai (Teva); and Rabbi Ed Feinstein, Valley Beth Shalom. In addition our own Vicky Kelman (San Francisco BJE) will present a master class.

We will run from 4-6 on Sunday, 8:30-12:30 Monday-Thursday. Several working lunches will take place including Small and Isolated Congregations (for which a little scholarship money exists), Legacy Heritage Groups, and perhaps a couple of others.

For information e-mail joel@torahaura.com. To participate, sign-up on your CAJE application. To be on the list for more information as it is known, again the e-mail is joel@torahaura.com.

Learning About Autism

by Josh Barkin

My commute to the Torah Aura Productions Headquarters (in beautiful Vernon, CA) is kind of long. Or it can be, depending on the unpredictable traffic patterns of the 10 freeway. To pass the time, I listen to a bunch of podcasts. Basically, podcasts are like radio programs that you can download and listen to whenever you want. In fact, all of my favorite podcasts are actually weekly public radio programs that — instead of tuning in to my local NPR station at their scheduled times — I download and listen to whenever I feel like it. My favorites are This American Life (out of WBEZ in Chicago), Radiolab (from WNYC in New York), and Studio 360 (also from WNYC). I download all of these podcasts through iTunes, and they are automatically downloaded to my iPod. Then I hook up the iPod to the car stereo, and I can listen on my way to and from the office. (This sounds very high tech, but it’s actually very easy. Even if you don’t have an iPod, you can use iTunes to download the podcasts and then burn them to a CD.)

This is all a very long way of getting to my point:

This week’s episode of Studio 360 is all about autism, and about people who fall along various points of the autism spectrum. It’s an amazing hour of radio. They interview an author who has Asperger’s syndrome, and they have pieces about autistic kids getting involved in musical theatre and scientists watching movies with autistic adults in order to better understand how people with autism see the world.

It made me think a lot about the autistic kids who’ve been my students in a number of Jewish educational settings. I’ve worked with Asperger’s kids, non-communicative autistic kids, and high-functioning autistic kids. In all cases, my biggest challenge as a teacher was trying to meet the learners where they were at.

The radio program cites a recent CDC study that suggests that 1-in-15 children in the United States has some form of autism. Assuming this is true (and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, but I have to admit that I’m pretty poorly versed in autism research), then a significant number of our students in Jewish schools are autistic. (Or… maybe there are a lot of autistic kids out there who aren’t being served by Jewish educational institutions.)

I know there’s lots of work being done to improve the way we serve children with special needs and their families. There are organizations that do really good work on this front, and lots of synagogues are putting lots of resources into serving this particular part of our community. But the simple truth is that too many teachers (myself included) are poorly equipped to work with autistic students.

And though lots of training and staff-education is really important, maybe the easiest thing we can do is to learn to see the world through the eyes of people with autism. This week’s episode of Studio 360 helped me to start doing just that. I highly recommend it.

To listen to it yourself, visit http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2008/03/28, and click the “Download Show” link on the left-hand side.Joel Grishaver