Online Community “Higiya Zman Hinuch” will reach out to a wider target audience in order to promote dialogue on the importance of teaching and promoting excellence
Three years ago, the foundation established an online community, under the name: “It’s Time for Education” (Higiya Zman Hinuch). It quickly became extremely active, and today comprises the largest social media educational community in Israel with a membership of over 30,000 teachers, potential teaching candidates, and people interested in mathematics and science education. This unique platform allows the foundation to interact with its target audiences, to provide them with information about programs, and to facilitate direct discussion between them.
As planned, in 2015, we expanded the reach of the community’s e-magazine, to concentrate its efforts on explaining and exploring high quality teaching of mathematics and the sciences, and encouraging a dialogue around this theme. At the beginning of 2016 the magazine reached a record number of 250,000 readers. In the preceding 6 months there were 150,000 readers every month. Over 100 people have contributed content to the magazine, including regular stories from the field by volunteer writers and teacher-bloggers who experiment with different teaching techniques in their classrooms and report back to their colleagues via the magazine on their experiences.
The magazine significantly expanded the clinical teaching section to include translated research materials by academics such as Daniel Willingham and John Hattie. The magazine makes them more accessible to the public by summarizing them in readable chunks, creating infographics, checklists, and features that the professional community can engage with more easily.
In 2015, Higiya Zman Chinuch issued a print edition, and established a separate website called ‘Teaching Plus” to function as an integrator for teacher residency programs, providing potential teaching candidates with up-to-date and relevant information, and enabling interested candidates to easily apply to one of the programs.
Despite the success so far, there are a number of areas that we still need to develop and improve:
Additional activities in 2016 include the preparation of 500 copies of a print edition to mark two years of the magazine – this will be distributed to our partners in the professional community, political leaders, Ministry of Education, and stake holders in education. Moreover, we will continue to reach out to a wider target audience by organizing gatherings and special events for teachers and by teachers. For example, creating face-to-face meetings for community members to promote dialogue on the importance of teaching and promoting excellence; collaborating with organizations who want to approach the educational community to create educational encounters and discourse; creating a dedicated conference where participants would discuss quality teaching; and collaborations with events by foundation partners, such as Teacher’s Day, 5km Race for 5-units, and Teachers on the Bar.
To do so, a freelance coordinator will be employed to work 70% FTE, alongside the magazine editor, in order to take over day-to-day tasks of operating the community, and to enable the team to dedicate more time to planning and developing the next stages of expansion and development described above.
It should be noted that since Higiya Zman Hinuch plays such an effective role in our communications strategy, we intend to continue to operate it internally in the medium-term. In the future, we will have to consider whether it is appropriate to continue to operate it ourselves.