Huntington Beach Academy Teacher Wins AVI CHAI Educational Technology Grant

(lubavitch.com) For her work, “Enhancing Language Skills Through Technology Driven Global Connections,” Hebrew Academy teacher Ms. Miriam Gold, a teacher at Chabad’s Huntington Beach Hebrew Academy, has been awarded a grant from the AVI CHAI Foundation.

Mrs. Gold’s project will bring current events in Israel and around the world in Hebrew to students by way of streaming media in real time. Hebrew Academy students will follow up this activity through discussion about daily living, culture and politics with their alumni living in Israel through web/video conferencing. Ms. Gold will use smartboard technology and related computer generated programs in this program.

The Huntington Beach yeshiva day school has garnered numerous awards in recent years, standing out for its wide range of achievements from excellence in education to taking the lead in going green. Rabbi Newman, principal of the Hebrew Academy, says the school administration is “delighted and proud that Ms. Gold has been selected for the AVI CHAI Educational Technology grant.

The grant, he says, will allow Ms. Gold “to enrich her classroom and provide the students with skills they will need as they grow as learners in the 21st century.”

The AVI CHAI Foundation, a New York-based private foundation dedicated to supporting and encouraging the Jewish day school and camp movements, developed the educational technology experiment grant program two years ago in an effort to indentify key ways to apply technological advances to the work of day schools.

Intended as a means to learn from this field, AVI CHAI announces a competitive grant opportunity, providing allocations of $2,000 to $10,000 for those educators who can identify and develop innovative approaches to using technology to solve a pedagogic classroom problem.  Ms. Gold was one of 20 applicants selected.

“Some of the most creative innovations in Jewish education are quietly happening in day school classrooms across the country, says Yossi Prager, AVI CHAI’s executive director in North America

As part of the program, grant recipients are expected to post regularly on the blog edtechexp.blogspot.com so that other educators can learn from this experience. Past blog conversations have included integrating smartboards into Judaic curricula, using video to advance Hebrew instruction, and creative applications of podcasting.

“We are happy to support these inventive teachers, but most excited to be sharing their ideas and providing learning opportunities to a broader audience through the ed tech blog.”