Executive Summary
Project Mission:
At MediaMidrash we seek to raise the quality of Jewish education by offering teachers easy access to 21st century multimedia technologies. MediaMidrash is an online platform linking multimedia content to innovative curricula, providing Jewish educators the ability to bring art, animation, film and music directly into their classrooms.
Value Proposition:
Teaching a generation of digital natives requires tools to easily integrate technology into the classroom. While there is a critical mass of Jewish multimedia content online, it is located in disparate locations and searching for usable content is like finding a needle in a haystack. MediaMidrash gives educators the ability to quickly, efficiently and effectively use multimedia technology in their classrooms, linking videos to curricula, in an easy-to-use search optimized, intuitive user interface. MediaMidrashs value extends beyond educators providing Jewish media content creators the ideal platform to release and publicize their work to students and teachers.
Market Opportunity:
There is a large corpus of educational research that shows that education technology helps further student learning. In recognition of this fact a number of foundations have begun to provide resources toward this goal. In the past two years major foundations such as AVI CHAI, Jim Joseph and Legacy Heritage, have donated millions of dollars to support the integration of new technologies into Jewish Education. While the hardware and infrastructure for the 21st century classroom is being funded, quality curricular content for this classroom is needed. Although this content has been developed quite successfully for secular education, and while there has been some development of multimedia Jewish content, to date this content has not been packaged in a successful way for the vast majority of Jewish educational professionals working in the nearly 3,000 North American Jewish educational institutions. MediaMidrash directly addresses this need.
Business Model:
MediaMidrash is structured as a not-for-profit that utilizes a premium service business model. Access to the website and library will be free. Schools and other institutions will have the ability to pay for premium services ranging from design of custom video and curricular content, development of institutional media libraries, customized home and splash pages for institutions, staff training, and interactive online educational modules.
Team:
The MediaMidrash team is made up of two young, innovative Jewish educators with extensive experience in formal and informal Jewish education. Russel M. Neiss is currently the Elementary and Middle School Librarian for the Rodeph Sholom Day School in New York City and is an expert in educational technologies, metadata, and Jewish educational resources. Charlie Schwartz is a rabbinic student at the Jewish Theological Seminary as a Wexner Graduate Fellow, and brings a background in Israel education, camping and supplementary school teaching.