“It’s Time for Education” 2024 and Anniversary

This year marks the 10^th anniversary of “It’s Time for Education”, a digital magazine established by the foundation in 2014. The magazine was initially created to support the foundation’s attempt to attract talent into teaching mathematics and science in high schools. In recent years, however, the magazine expanded to provide educational content to a wider audience of teachers and education professionals. Today, it has 37,000 subscribers and 65,000 followers on social media. Five hundred teachers have contributed articles to the magazine’s online content.

The magazine includes mostly text-based articles, written by teachers. Two such articles are published every week. In addition, we have begun to include video-based clips and videocast conversations. From time to time, the magazine highlights a topic of interest reflecting the current focus of the foundation, such as excellence classes in middle school and the gender gap in science studies. The magazine also provides media coverage of conferences and events initiated by the foundation and lately, also of special events that are convened by our partners and other foundations.

The foundation has thus far been the sole funder of the magazine’s operations, with an annual contribution of approximately 350,000 NIS. In recent years, we have become more open to creating relevant partnerships that would also take part in providing resources. We intend to expand this line of work in the coming years, while thinking about the longer-term continuity of the very popular magazine.

Towards 2024, we are aiming to extend the magazine’s reach to an additional 10,000 subscribers and 15,000 followers. We will expand the collaborative efforts with partners and celebrate a decade of the magazine. To achieve these goals the magazine will take the following steps:

1. Initiate and respond to collaborations with partners, such as the Ministry of Education, the Lion Family Foundation, as well as digital content platforms that have large audiences of educators. In such collaborations we will focus on the quality of content, the importance of relationships, and the possibility of attracting resources.
2. One such partnership will be with the Parents Section of Ynet (the most popular news and content website in Israel). The Parents Section reaches 150,000 readers per article. Together, we will produce six videocast episodes accompanied by text articles. Topics will include how to overcome gender gaps, parental roles in choosing study tracks, and global insights on education for excellence. The episodes and articles will be shared on Ynet’s social media channels as well as in the magazine.
3. Found a WhatsApp community, so that readers could access the magazine’s content more conveniently, and at the same time, improve digital targeting to reach additional relevant audiences.
4. Focusing on the current foundation’s strategy by organizing two writing workshops for 40 mathematics and science teachers, approaching grantees to contribute articles to the magazine, and creating a middle school section within the magazine.

In addition, to celebrate 10 years, we will convene a special event for 80 participants, including magazine writers and editors over the years, Ministry of Education professionals, press editors and philanthropic foundations. Ahead of the event, we plan to organize a competition of the most interesting articles over the years and to showcase the ten winners in a special printed booklet.  The guests at the special event will be asked to write an eleventh article based on “wisdom of crowds”, competing with AI that will be asked to do the same.

* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 523