Electronics at Camp

Electronics at Camp

While we understand that technology plays an important role in the lives of our campers, we also strive to provide an experience at Tel Yehudah which nurtures real-time social connections amongst the members of our community.  Deep and rich face-to-face conversations take place under apple trees or in bunks late at night.  This freedom from following the news feeds, tweets and Instagram posts of hundreds of friends provides the opportunity to form meaningful and long-lasting friendships built on a set of common experiences in a shared community. (Of course when summer ends, these technologies will help keep our campers in touch until the next summer together.)

In keeping with these goals, campers are not permitted to have any devices* that can be cell or Wi-Fi enabled. (This includes but is not limited to cell phones, iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, Droids, laptops, Kindle Fires etc.)  Any of these types of devices that are brought to camp will be turned into the office and placed in the safe at the beginning of camp, and any devices found throughout the session will also be collected.  Campers who are participating in out-of-camp trips that take them to cities, may retrieve their cell phones from the office prior to those trips as they provide an additional way for staff to keep in touch with campers.  Campers are permitted to bring MP3 players such as iPod shuffles and digital cameras that do not connect through Wi-Fi or cellular service.

*We will allow e-book readers that cannot also be used as Internet browsers or contain apps. (Books will need to be downloaded onto these devices prior to camp as Wi-Fi will not be available to campers.