It's always good to check progress...

It would be an understatement to say that there's a lot going on with technology at Yeshivat Noam. Our Chromebooks, iPads, MacBooks and computer labs are all seeing heavy use as students take notes, answer questions, complete projects and communicate with their teachers and peers digitally.

On top of that, I meet almost daily with teachers, students, parents and administrators about considering new tools, piloting new initiatives and exploring whatever technological marvel is just around the bend.

For example, just in the last week, we have begun to try out some new technological tools in our math department.

Mrs. Sari Sheinfeld has begun to flip her classroom by creating videos to introduce new concepts. Using a wireless microphone and her SMART board, Mrs. Sheinfeld can record her presentation and make the recording available to students.

Her students can then watch the recordings at home, pre-loading themselves with the content before coming to class to apply what they have learned on their own. This frees the teacher from the front of the classroom, allowing Mrs. Sheinfeld to coach students while they work together on problems in class instead of lecturing to the group and sending them home to practice alone.

Meanwhile, in the room next door, an Ipevo document camera allows Mrs. Deena Bloom to project work up onto the SMART board so that students can dissect the problem-solving methods in real-time and learn from each other interactively.

Using the camera together with the SMART Notebook software, Mrs. Bloom and her students can annotate right on top of real-world materials without needing to photograph or scan them first. This low-cost, intuitive device removes the barriers between the conceptual math Mrs. Bloom teaches and the real world in which her students live.

We've got more coming, too. The entire Middle School faculty met recently for the latest session in the year-long, differentiated professional development series on Educational Technology Integration and 21st Century Learning. Teachers are working with content-area experts to increase their technology skills and will soon pair up so that those more comfortable with technology integration can mentor their less experienced colleagues.

With so much innovation on the horizon, it's easy to overlook what we have already accomplished but, earlier today, two members of our Science Department, Mrs. Aliza Chanales and Mrs. Barbara Sehgal, showed me a dramatic reminder. They were filling out an application to join a cutting-edge curriculum-development project for the National Science Foundation and ran across a question asking them to identify what technology tools were available in their classrooms... and, as you can see, they were able to check all of the available boxes because, here at Yeshivat Noam, these tools are all already available to our students!

Yes, there are exciting, innovative, revolutionary things ahead. But we must remember how far we have come already and how lucky our faculty and students are today.