Welcome to the group! I'd love to find out some similarities and differences between teaching in the states and Israel.

OK Chris,
I"d be glad to try to answer any questions you have, although I have never taught in the USA.
I work at Neveh Channah, a small girls high school in a rural area about half an hour from Jerusalem. I have contact with other schools in my capacity as one of the coordinators of the IPNCL - http://education.gov.il/ipncl.

reuven--I am interested also about education in Isreal and on kibbutz life.

Hi Mary,
My wife and I have been living on Kibbutz Kfar Etzion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Etzion -, a religious kibbutz - http://www.kdati.org.il/info/English/About_Kdati.htm - about 20 kms. south of Jerusalem since 1970. We were born in the US, were active in Bnei Akiva, religious Zionist youth movement, - http://www.bneiakiva.org/about/basics/ - spent a year in Israel on a religious kibbutz, returned to US to complete university BA degree and returned with a group of families to help restablish Kfar Etzion as a kibbutz.
Presently, I am teaching and serving as ed tech coordinator at Neveh Channah - Girls High School and helping to coordinate an international collaborative literature project for the Israeli Ministry of Education. I am presently working on a PhD in Information Science at Bar Ilan University.
My wife is community public health nurse at the nearby town of Beitar Ilit.
We have 6 married children - 3 of who live on Kibbutz Kfar Etzion. The others live in other areas of Israel.

Shalom, Reuven,

Well, I finally joined up!
Thanks for the tag - my second one in as many days!
Kol tuv,

Caren

Good evening

I'm French and i teach history and geography in a middle school. Congratulations for your work with your pupils, even if i don"t understand hebrew.

I'm writing you because i wondered if you are interested by a distant collaboration with my students about education to peace. Maybe you know that french people doesn't know very well the israelo-palestinian conflict, and you know that resurgence of forms of antisemitism in France since Second Intifada worried jewish community... This is the reason why, probably, the french national organization "School to the Cinema", schedules this year the documentary film "Promises". Unfortunately, this wonderful movie was before Intifada, so i need to give us infos about the current situation for Israelians and Palestinians ... And the best way is to join children from Israel and Palestine; like in the movie...

Vincent Mespoulet
Schools Beyond the Walls
http://horslesmurs.ning.com

Hi Reuven,

Thanks for your message. French teachers well informed like me know about this very long strike. We like strikes in France ;-) and i'll be on strike next january 24th ;-) . It's very kind of you to relay to the Inspector for teaching the french language ! I wondered also if you accept to let me upload on my ning the video realized by your students last summer about Sderot. But i don't know how to upload it. Have you an embedded code ?
Have a nice day !
Vincent

Hi Vincent,
The Sderot video can be seen here: http://tinyurl.com/23ch3e
You can copy the embedding code from there.
Will let you know if I hear from the inspector.
All the best,
Reuven

Reuven, the VT comments were fabulous. Perhaps you can add a link of the VT to your site for your classes.

Now it's time to make your own. :) If you need any help, just send me a twit and I can skype you through the process.

Shalom, Reuven!
x
Shoshana
Home Educating in the UK

Hi Reuven,

With your work in Education Technology I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's power point presentation platform. Both are web based, have a bunch of features and free basic service. Both technologies might be helpful to staff and students atyour Yeshiva.

Hi Reuven,

My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham, MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. Since you are in the 'e-learning and online teaching' group, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2009, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win a competition for startup funding on ideablob.com. You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975 . We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com

Shalom Reuven,

Dennis O'Conner suggested that I have a lot to learn from you. Shall we communicate?

Shavuah Tov,

Richard

Shalom Reuven,

I just added the MOFET JTEC to my web-based resource list on my blog.

Thank you,

Richard