Jewish educators around the globe are perpetually seeking techniques to teach Jewish texts in a manner that is relevant and exciting to the next generation of Jewish youth. Bible Raps (PresenTense Institute, '07) attacks this educational challenge from a fresh angle, adopting and redirecting the popularmedium of rap music to show Judaism’s core texts as rich sources of meaning, drama, and inspiration.

With Matt Bar’s recent release of the Bible Raps album, we are eager to engage with more teachers and expect more  enthusiastic testimonials from teachers who use the tool kit in their classroom.

Over the past year a team of educators have worked to create what MyJewishLearning.com has called “a seriously mind-blowing teacher’s guide.”
 

PresenTense champions the use of social media and bi-directional communications in promoting the stories of your organizations and ventures. Now we're trying to upgrade our own platforms.

The revamped PresenTense Newsletter has been keeping the PT-community in the loop for just about half a year. Do you have ideas to improve it? To transform it? To optimize our other social networking venues?

We want to hear what you think. In return, we'll give all interview respondents exclusive access to select PresenTense Institute skillbuilding sessions with today's leading innovators -- until now available only to PresenTense fellows and alumni.

Check out the 5-minute survey, here. 

PresenTense is spending the day up North, visiting Israel's leading centers of innovation and technology. The fellows were up early to make it to Haifa by 9am for a private tour of Google's Haifa office and some exclusive peeks at its newest technologies (sorry - we weren't allowed to video it!).

A more thorough write-up will follow, but here's a teaser to whet your appetite:

PresenTense is spending the day up North, visiting Israel's leading centers of innovation and technology. The fellows were up early to make it to Haifa by 9am for a private tour of Google's Haifa office and some exclusive peeks at its newest technologies (sorry - we weren't allowed to video it!).

A more thorough write-up will follow, but here's a teaser to whet your appetite:

As I mentioned yesterday, Ariel and Aharon are among the professional presenters at the ROI conference. There's been fantastic buzz in the halls about the presentations, and I've been seeing some of the sites discussed opened up on the public computer terminals.

Take a look: 

And another video after the jump -

I've just found a few minutes here at ROI - a conference that networks young Jewish innovators - to post a quick update. Until now, we've been pitching, meeting, mingling, workshopping, and of course, eating.

ROI (http://www.roicommunity.org/) - now in the 4th year of its conference - excels at bringing together an international collection of Jewish do-ers, and supporting a network of vision. PresenTense has always been a close ally of ROI - aligned in mission and vision, and so it's no surprise that about 10-15% of the conference's participants are involved in PresenTense in some way.

Further - today and tomorrow, PresenTense co-directors Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz will be presenting training sessions on media tools and guerilla campaigns, and tomorrow evening the PresenTense Fellows will be joining the ROI community for an evening of further networking. I'm really excited for my fellow conferencers to meet the Fellows -- I've already made about a dozen connections between our fellows and the ROIers working on related projects.

As a New Yorker transplanted to Jerusalem, I find the exposure to the international breadth of Jewish identity the most invaluable aspect of this program. I truly relish the chance to build meaningful relationships with Jews from places like Latin America, Amsterdam, India - and indeed partnerships with their projects.

To get a sense of the diverse nature of the crowd, check out this video, and some others from our opening night presentation. Each ROIer was given a remote that allowed them to click in their answers (America's Funniest Home Video-style), so we got some real time data on the group's demographics. Check it:

I've created a whole playlist of ROI videos on our youtube page.

 PTI is on its first day trip of the summer - spending the day in Tel Aviv. This morning we joined Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) for some exercises in creative thinking, which helped the fellows develop process for tackling their ventures for new angles.

We've just had (a great) lunch at the Center for Educational Technology (CET) and are now sitting down for a presentation with Avi and Avital. Last year CET was one of the highlights of the summer, with some strong partnerships developing between PTI ventures and CET.

Check out the video as Aharon and Ariel explain some of the Center's background:

Huffington Post, one of the most widely read blogs on the Internet (monthly visitors come in at about 9 million), just featured PresenTense fellow Josh Keyak's newly established HuffPo blog. 

In it, Josh discusses the need for greening initiatives, his vision in particular, and his participation in the PresenTense Institute.

Check out Josh's inaugural HuffPo post, and make sure to follow it as it grows. 

You may have noticed some changes here at presentense.org.

But these changes are only the beginning...

This site is what we're calling our "Alpha" site. We've spent the past several months rebuilding the PresenTense portal from the ground up. We talked with members about what they'd want to see, with usability experts, with design professionals and more. But most importantly, we want to hear from you.

By the end of the summer you'll be seeing yet another redesign of the site, which we're (not so creatively) calling "Beta". 

Ideally, we wouldn't be introducing and reintroducing new designs for the site. It might be considered by some bad form. But we've been eager to makeover the architecture of presentense.org, upgrade the functionality, and give it a makeover. We hope you'll send us your feedback and ideas for new features.

 As orientation draws near (1 hour to the first session!), things are eerily calm: welcome kits are prepared, the schedule is locked, the interns are in top form. All that's left to do is get to know one another and jump into the work.

Here's a video of us doing the former: