Tel-Hai Magazine 2022

Innovation in Education and teaching

Tel-Hai College trains the teachers of the future at the Katzrin campus

The EduTech Innovation Lab The EduTech Innovation Lab is dedicat ed to integrating teaching and learning with the technologies supporting the transformation that education is under going. In this laboratory, students build up expertise in the use of these technol ogies, deepen their understanding and appreciation of the potential these tech nologies have for enhancing education, and learn to incorporate them into teaching. ‘Digital graduates’, ‘computa tional thinking’, ‘a platform for innova tion’ and, of course, ‘EduTech’, are some of the buzzwords in this seemingly futur istic environment but, in fact, the future is already here. The EduTech Lab is headed by Zohar Segal, Chief Technologist at the lab for the last 5 years, who left the Hi-tech In dustry and retrained in education, and Netanel Bar David, a master’s graduate at the college, who now leads the Tech nology-based Learning and Teaching course and has worked at the campus for the last 8 years. The lab is housed in a converted classroom and contains vari

The world of educa tion is undergoing a transformation. In the near future, learn ing and teaching

ous computers, robots, a 3-D printer, electronic tools, a range of hardware, virtual reality programs, 3-D modelling, screens of different sizes, and raw mate rials for creating models and visual aids. Segal and Bar David emphasize that the EduTech lab is an innovation laboratory rather than an innovation center. “It’s a lab because we must invent things! If we were to wait for the invention to arrive, we’d be obsolete by the time it did. The pace of change is so fast today and respond ing to this is fundamental. A college has to look to the future, when training its stu dents. It has to make inno vation an integral part of its existence, not wait around until innova tion arrives,” says Segal. The manpower and resources devoted to the EduTech lab are minimal, and the gap between the vision and reality is still significant. It will require greater invest ments of time and funds to keep it in pace with future changes in educational needs. And yet, touring the lab, one can encounter the wonderful work students are doing there, such as a student from the Israel Studies Program building a

methods will change dramatically. Class rooms will be replaced by state-of-the-art learning spaces, and the traditional prac tice of frontal teaching, using a white board and a marker, will be exchanged for advanced learning methods and tech nologies. This process began slowly but will become increasingly accelerated, in the years to come, and will affect every school-aged child in the country, from their first day at school to graduation. The schoolchildren of the future will learn new skills, in an innovative environ ment, and this necessitates adapting teacher-training to the future too. It was precisely in anticipation of this that the Katzrin campus was designated as the Campus of Innovation in Education and Teaching following Ohalo’s merger with Tel-Hai College. The Katzrin campus provides several innovative learning spaces: the EduTech Innovation Lab, the Biophilic site, the Simulation Center and the Teaching Development Unit.

Tel-Hai Magazaine | 2022 24