Source: Kav Lachinuch
The Israel Center for Educational Technology in cooperation with MindCET held the Shaping the Future III Conference on June 1-4, 2015, which was filled with screen-centered solutions. MindCET is an edtech innovation center that brings together entrepreneurs, educators and researchers to develop innovative groundbreaking educational technology in Israel and beyond.
Participants in the conference included Education Minister Naftali Bennett; CET CEO Gila Ben-Har, incubator manager Avi Warshavsky; Carmel Ventures cofounder, CET board member Avi Zeevi and CET chairman Itsik Danziger, who is also the chairman of Galil Software.
The conference featured speakers and workshops focused on the latest technology trends, such as virtual reality, Internet of Things and the maker movement.
“Technology has the power to narrow the gaps between strong and weak students, between rich and poor students and between students who live in Tel Aviv or in the North and South,” Education Minister Bennett said. “In the past, you had to be rich to access information. Today, you just need information to get rich.
“A thousand backpacks couldn’t hold all the information that’s available in one small tablet. We must learn to take advantage of this gift and use it well. The world is our playground, and there are no borders to how much we can learn. We must harness the resources at our disposal to make the Israeli education system an amazing place for learning.”
The keynote speaker was LeVar Burton, an actor and award-winning producer, who is best known for his role as Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He spoke about Reading Rainbow, the long-running PBS children’s series he hosted and produced, which encourages children to read.
Other speakers at the conference were Dale Dougherty, the founder and CEO of Maker Media; Daniel Obodovski, the guru of wearable technology and coauthor of The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things; Robert Gehorsam, executive director of the Institute of Play, which has developed a gamelike approach to learning; and Walter Bender, cofounder of MIT’s Media Lab and creator of the Sugar Interface.
See the entire article at the Jerusalem Post.