technology

The students of the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester typically excel in such intellectual areas as chess, Moot Beit Din (a program in which students adjudicate legal cases using Jewish texts) and the National Merit competition. This week the school went high-tech, conducting its first Robotic Competition. Under the leadership of teacher Daniel Aviv, teams of students in the Westchester School designed and built small robots that can perform a specific task. The creations can move and turn — but they have not yet learned to play chess or argue a legal case.

You can’t avoid it anymore.

Computer-based games like Farmville or Angry Birds or Grand Theft Auto, available on laptops and phones and game consoles, have become almost as ubiquitous as social media sites like Facebook.

Whether you are a teacher or principal, a parent or grandparent, a marketer or consumer, a smartphone user or a paperback-reading commuter, you can’t help but notice how these games fill the downtime minutes of millions of people, and increasingly are the first thing they connect to when they boot up their machines.

No one standing outside Yeshivas Ohev Shalom would peg it as an educational technology trendsetter.

No one standing outside Yeshivas Ohev Shalom would peg it as an educational technology trendsetter.

This tiny, fervently Orthodox high school is housed in a rundown synagogue in Los Angeles’ Fairfax District, a neighborhood that, like New York’s Lower East Side, has largely transitioned from old-world Jewish to hipster. Even inside — where boys,

When Conner was born 11 years ago, Andi Rosenthal was 30 and in the process of converting to Judaism. “I had no idea that there was room in my life or in my heart” for Conner and his younger brother, Ryan. “I never anticipated the space that they would create for themselves and how much love would emerge for them. I never knew that they would be just everything to me,” says the Westchester resident.

She expected those emotions from the boys’ parents, she says, but she was just their aunt. Well, not “just.”