NEEDED: COMMUNAL PLANNING AND BETTER FUNDING

That Central agencies for Jewish education throughout North America are in difficulty is now an established fact. The challenges facing these agencies relate principally to the two “f's”: function and financing. As the configuration and power structure of Jewish communities have changed, the traditional activities of bureaus and boards of Jewish education have come under intense scrutiny. At the same time, the geometric escalation of Jewish community demands on decreasing financial resources has made it increasingly difficult for bureaus to secure the funding needed to carry out their full array of programs.     

The Year 2000 Problem and Ethical Responsibility: A Call to Action

Many organizations have made substantial progress in solving the year 2000 computer problem, while many others lag perilously behind. With the year 2000 deadline looming ever closer, this article examines several key issues, including the nature of the year 2000 problem itself, its potential to do harm, the progress that organizations have made to date on this issue, and factors that have worked to inhibit or facilitate organizational responses to this problem. An ethical analysis of the year 2000 problem is presented that reveals that both top management and IS professionals have an ethical responsibility to act on this issue. Organizations are urged to make the completion of their year 2000 problem efforts a top priority, because it is their responsibility and it serves as an investment for the future.     

Development of an instrument for exploring preservice technology teachers’ maker-based technological pedagogical content knowledge

With the development of the maker movement, more and more teachers are applying a broad range of technological tools in their pedagogy, instead of only information technology. This study details the development and validation of the Teachers Maker-based TPACK Survey Instrument (TMTSI), a revised model designed to measure technology teachers’ maker-based technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) in utilizing maker-based tools to support their teaching. We recruited 165 preservice secondary technology teachers in Taiwan for this study and confirmatory factor analysis was applied to validate the instrument. Our findings suggest that TMTSI provided a valid and highly reliable research-based instrument that also serves as a professional development model to help scaffold the development of K-12 technology teachers. This paper details the theoretical foundations of TMTSI, reports on its reliability and validity, and discusses the application and implications of TMTSI for teacher education and professional development.