Meet the Future Today: MediaMidrash

The intersection of technology and education is a hot subject in the Jewish world. It manifests itself on blogs, at conferences and seminars, in curricula and research and in new innovation.

One of the lessons we’ve learned from these endeavors is that by harnessing new technologies, creative 21st century educational tools can impact Jewish values, make our historic traditions accessible to learners and ensure relevancy for the future. And in building new infrastructure, innovators are continually bridging the gaps between past and present, Israel and the Diaspora.

One such newly launched endeavor is MediaMidrash – developed by a pair of young, innovative New York based Jewish educators, Charlie Schwartz and Russel Neiss.

Designed to raise the quality of Jewish education by offering teachers easy access to 21st century multimedia technologies, MediaMidrash functions as an online platform linking multimedia content to innovative curricula while providing Jewish educators the ability to bring art, animation, film and music directly into their classrooms. It is an ideal vehicle for Jewish media content creators to release and publicize their work to the educational community.

Although content has been developed quite successfully for secular education, and while there has been some development of multimedia Jewish content, to date it has not been packaged in a successful way for the vast majority of Jewish educational professionals working in the field. MediaMidrash plans to address this need.

You can learn more about Media Midrash, and contact Charlie or Russel through their Website.

MediaMidrash is one of the ventures to emerge from this summer’s cohort of the PresenTense Institute.