Opening Minds, Bridging Differences, Living Jewish Values.

Technology

New technologies are integral to The Heschel School's teaching. Throughout the divisions of the school we are constantly evaluating and implementing new technologies that aid instruction and learning. Software, hardware, and teaching aids are adopted and adapted regularly to keep up with emerging trends.

Heschel was an early adopter of Smartboards and the High School was founded with a one-to-one notebook computer program. Interactive instruction is a cornerstone of High School teaching. Teachers can share the work from the board daily with students allowing them to spend more time working and paying attention and less time copying text.

Our Lower School now has interactive whiteboards in every classroom. The faculty are adopting new teaching methods that allow them to spend more time working individually with students and less time in the front of the room. Students actively participate in lessons, manipulating objects and text, answering questions, and doing math in ways that stimulate and engage them.

Middle School students also benefit from interactive whiteboards in every classroom. Additionally the students are adopting the modern, mobile technologies of the Cloud by working with our cloud-based Learning Management System and Google Docs. These technologies foster collaboration among students and greater interaction between students and teachers.

Our curriculum includes introductory programming in both Scratch and Processing. Both languages were developed at the MIT Media Lab for the purpose of teaching logic and programming. They are also freely available for home use, so students can extend their learning outside of class time.

Our approach is to encourage students to be comfortable and familiar with technology, as well as to be curious about and experiment with the technologies at hand and to dream of what they can build for the future.

Technological innovation is prompting societal change at a pace unprecedented in human history. Teaching any specific technology is not the point – our goal is to teach adaptability and understanding. We are driven by the concept that the jobs we are preparing our students for have not yet been invented.