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Thursday August 2, 2007

Click here: Download Jewish learning

CAJE broadens its scope by posting conference highlights on the Net

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

When Jeff Lasday speaks at the 32nd annual conference on alternative Jewish education, thousands of people nowhere near the St. Louis site will be able to see and listen to his presentation.

That’s because Lasday, the new director of the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE), and his colleagues will make the conference a living model of its 21st century theme.

“This is a first time experiment in using technology to involve people not in attendance with what is happening at the conference,” he said.

The experiment — dubbed Virtual CAJE — will let anyone interested in Jewish education listen and watch conference speakers via the Internet. In (almost) real time. Conference coordinators will post video to YouTube.com, photographs to Flickr.com, PowerPoint presentations to Slideshare.net and Lasday’s thoughts on a blog, www.caje32.wordpress.com.

“We want to open up a discussion of what’s going on in Jewish education,” said Shira Dicker, a spokeswoman for the organization. “It doesn’t have the aura of cool and it suffers for the lack of that. And yet, if you are interested in the Jewish future, there is nothing more vital than investing in Jewish education, being a part of it, knowing about it.”

CAJE 32: Engaging 21st Century Jewish Learners aims to spark a dialogue about Jewish education that reaches beyond the 1,500 teachers, principals and religious school directors who will attend the conference Aug. 5 at Washington University in St. Louis. Lasday and Dicker hope to engage a broad audience by making the conference available to those who can’t or don’t want to attend.

Janet Harris, a local expert in early childhood education, has attended countless CAJE conferences and will go to the upcoming one, too. She said educators in their 20s and 30s will probably love and immediately appreciate the high tech aspects of the conference; older educators may struggle to access all the Web offerings. But this way, they’ll be forced to dive right in.

“It’s something we need to work with in the field, so it will be a great professional development tool,” she said.

Harris is the director of a new early childhood education initiative at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. She previously worked at the Osher Marin JCC as director of their preschool.

The CAJE conference “is really about connecting with colleagues and learning from them,” she said. “I’m looking forward to hearing about other initiatives and research, and how we can move forward without recreating the wheel.”

Since its inception 32 years ago (in part by East Bay Rabbi Stuart Kelman), CAJE has advocated for Jewish educators, offered professional development to teachers and administrators and provided a range of resources for the classroom.

The organization’s new high tech focus comes on the heels of its new director. Lasday took over the organization in January from Eliot Spack, who worked as the agency’s executive director for 26 years. Lasday is only the third director in CAJE’s history.

“This was the house that Eliot built. He was an amazing, charismatic guy who handed over the organization to a quiet visionary,” Dicker said. “Jeff is such a different leader. I think CAJE is really going to evolve.”

Lasday certainly hopes so, and hopes that Jewish education evolves along with it.

“We have amazing facilities, wonderful textbooks and resource materials, but we still don’t have all the Jewish educators we need,” he said during a recent trip to San Francisco.

Checking the Web to see what those educators are talking about, he said, is a good place to start thinking about improvement.

For more information about the upcoming conference and the complete schedule, check www.caje.org.

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