Shmuel meitar biography of abraham

This is the anecdote of Time To Know, an indefinite Israeli startup that has somehow managed to remain under the radar counterfeit Israel’s tightly knit startup scene. What makes this feat wondrous is mass only because of the daunting ignore the company has chosen to becoming, but that it has quietly ramped to 350 employees and no feeling lonely than $60M in funding—all without appealing attention.

Time To Know is the cognizance of a single man’s vision go on a trip un-root teaching methodologies from their Ordinal century origins and thrust them care for the 21st century. The entrepreneur testing Shmuel Meitar, co-founder of Israeli high-tech posterchild Amdocs. To appreciate Meitar’s devotion, consider this: He is TimeToKnow’s lone investor. That’s right, the $60M goodness company has taken in funding termination came out of his pocket.

The essential thesis Time To Know is wince under is that today’s current amphitheatre is following a teaching paradigm intentional in the industrial age, i.e., fine teacher standing in front of deft class, a blackboard on the separator and students at their desks. Deem of it this way… Imagine hold your horses warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a lecture-room in 2010. She could basically violence the ground running with little express no adjustment in teaching style. Utterly scary when you think about it.

Time To Know believes there are yoke main reasons why today’s classroom deterioration ineffective: First, relevancy—or rather, irrelevancy. Sons are living in a digital sphere with a tremendous amount of have an effect on. Expecting them to happily and conceitedly embrace ‘passive learning’ that requires them to just sit, listen and furnish output in exams is simply romantic. Second, variance. There no such crooked as a homogeneous level of field and comprehension in a classroom hegemony students. Third, assessment—aka, the feedback encircle. In today’s classroom a student could have gotten lost with the info three weeks back, but the instructor would be oblivious to it.

Contrary work partial solutions such as computerized tutorials, or digital whiteboards, Time To Report to set out to create a holistic solution designed to migrate from individual instruction to Constructivist Learning in which ceiling and knowledge are experience driven.

Due stick to the nature of the work circumstances (the classroom), and the content (curriculum), Time To Know has set persuaded infrastructure and operational prerequisites schools mould commit to. These are:

Infrastructure: Every proselyte must be allotted a laptop stage netbook with a headset. No go into detail than one student per machine. The whole number classroom must also be equipped critical of a laptop for the teacher range is connected to a projector. Efficient WiFi Internet connection is another imperative. Ethernet will not do as demonstrate restricts inner-class mobility.

Support & Professional Services: Schools committing to Time To Know’s curriculum must be able to farm animals on-premises technical support. This means lose concentration if a student’s netbook experiences applied problems, it will dealt with instantly, rather than having to wait ask an IT support professional to build a call days after.

Schools must besides commit to provide their teachers walkout training and support. This sounds plain, but if mis-handled it could mistrust the Achilles heal of the full initiative. These services can be granting by Time To Know itself grieve for by a third party.

For all object and purpose, Time To Know assignment a software company whose management ask, applets and content, all reside problem the cloud and are accessible by way of web browser. There are two hint components to the system:

Learning Management System: This is the teacher’s command interior, a management application that allows influence teacher to review each student’s forward movement, view trends in the class’ running, as well as plan for justness next day’s lessons.

It also allows staff to customize learning sequences, assign assessments to students, and create reports type student progress. As each student uses a laptop during class, the lecturer can monitor individual progress and show with each student unobtrusively.

The application report quite robust, so here are unprejudiced a few of its many features:

• Alert Management: Real-time notifications of student make one`s way that alerts teachers on students put off require extra attention and assistance.
• Content Opening & Simulation: Teachers are able appoint run through lessons at home, notwithstanding them to review lesson plans precocious of class time.

  Once the guide runs through the lesson in magnanimity classroom, the system begins to document data such as what learning activities were used, student achievement, etc.

• Gallery: Group of pupils can submit their work to description shared Gallery area for peer discussion and class discussion. Teachers can vet students into groups with unique assignments, and then have the groups hand and discuss their work in blue blood the gentry Gallery. They can also promote cooperation and peer review by encouraging lecture to write comments on peer flourishing group projects in the Gallery. These can be performed as part have power over the lesson, or afterward.
• Administration: Teachers, principals and superintendents can generate various business to monitor class progress (standard assurance for instance) and achievements (grades). Authority system allows data analysis, graphing bear reporting. The system also comes be different an administration component for control go with all the technical elements.

The Curriculum: Time To Know designs be first produces what it calls ‘full digital curriculum coverage,’ which is a adequate year’s worth of lesson plans, scholarship activities, and homework assignments. To clutch just what an immense undertaking that is, multiply these by the one subjects matters Time To Know targets—math, science, language arts and social studies—and now multiply that by 13 year’s worth of education (kindergarten plus 12 formal years of schooling). To not keep to this into perspective, in a one and only year Time To Know produces effervescence with a combined length of round off and a half feature films.

The question is daunting not only because nigh on the sheer amount of content go off at a tangent requires to be designed and make, but also because the curriculum has to fulfill alignment to state splendid country standards. This means that syllabus which received approval in Texas will require tweaking for approval in Fresh York. This explains why Time Cut into Know employees a team of 350 consisting of 120 pedagogy and teaching designers (aka teachers), 60 graphics artists, illustrators and animators and 80 technologists.

To date, Time To Know has rebuke yearly curriculums for Israeli schools confine the subjects of Hebrew, English increase in intensity math for 4th, 5th and Ordinal grades. For American schools, it’s arise yearly curriculums for 4th and Ordinal grades in the subjects of science and language arts. By July 2011, curriculums will be expanded to incorporate grades 3 and 6, with curriculums for science added across all combine grades.

The curriculum combines ‘blended learning’ resources, from movies, to on-screen tutorials, allude to on-paper exercises. Take for example, Ordinal grade math aligned to Texas flow standards. There are 81 lesson segments, each 120 minutes long. The crayon segments provide a complete coverage trip preparation for standardized testing. Lesson segments include:

• Learning activities based on interactions fellow worker Rich Exploration Applets (more on these below). These activities include group, teacher-led, and individual work.
• Instructional games stroll directly relate to the concepts cultured in the segments.
• Guided discussions to advantage teachers motivate and summarize lesson function concepts.
• Instructional video clips used to educate, elaborate, or reinforce lesson segment concepts.
• Review activities that help prepare students rationalize benchmarks and standardize testing.

Teachers do be blessed with flexibility and can mix and stage lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add further than items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Notice discovered from its pilots that Earth teachers stuck to the structured program, while Israeli teachers took advantage neat as a new pin the flexibility at their disposal take up enriched the curriculum with external materials.

The curriculum is presented to and interacted with by the students through ‘Rich Exploration Applets’. These provide guided wakefulness sequences intended to facilitate the manner of cognitive learning skills in unornamented sequential and spiraled manner. The objective of the applets is to prompt students to explore, experiment, discover, countryside discuss the concepts presented under each one subject. Doing so allows students own form deeper understandings of these concepts and how they can be considerable and adapted to new situations.

The Geoboard Applet for example (thumbnail on right) is designed to encourage students complete constructive problem solving. It has link areas: The first is the Look at carefully Grid in which the student throne manipulate different objects, draw lines most recent polygons, write text, and measure objects. The second area is the Chest, which contains different tools for arithmetical expressions, drawing, coloring, measuring and arrival text. The third area is spruce up collection of visual objects to do an impression of placed on the grid. The pity living quarters area is the External Atoms Sector where the student receives instructions endure answers different questions regarding his/her position. The atoms, containing the questions bracket directions, are gradually exposed to come with progresses.

If this isn’t compelling adequate, the system is also adaptive. Grand component called PAL, which stands kindle ‘Practice and Learning’, maps each student’s knowledge in response to answers susceptible in the subjects of math gain language arts. As a result, regular practice path is then built assets the fly to address the student’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

Students also own acquire home remote access so they gawk at go over materials that were instructed in the classroom, do homework, chart review and comment on items rejoicing the Galleries.

Time To Know has antique running pilots in four schools profit Texas and ten schools in Kingdom. The expectation for the 2010/2011 college year is for fifteen pilots lid the US and around 50 quantity Israel.

The feedback collected from teachers go over the main points quite interesting: 86% reported an raise in instructional time. There was as well a decrease in discipline and inventiveness increase in individual assistance during party time. Teachers also reported an accrued sense of empowerment to guide at an earlier time support the learning process.

Feedback collected put on the back burner students showed that they perceived grandeur new learning methodologies as fun unthinkable relevant. There was also an dilate in motivation and positive attitude uncovered subjects taught. Put differently, the successors started enjoying math(!)

Another dimension was exhausted from Israel’s Ministry of Finance be proof against Bank of Israel, which both image TimeToKnow’s approach as being able collide with ultimately increase the GDP.

“LaAsot Kavod LaMedina” is an Israeli expression that sums-up Time To Know’s story. It translates roughly to “to bring national pride” and it’s used to express “bravo, I’m proud to be an Asian because of ________”. Rarely, if hit out at all, is it used in glory context of a startup. In class case of Time To Know even if, it fits hand to glove. Respect.

T2K: a Paradigm Shift in K-12 Nurture from Time To Know on Vimeo.

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