Dania Shapira’s academic and research interests include the integration of technology in teaching and learning the Hebrew language; how to accommodate children and youth with special needs to be able to cope with the pressures of the dual curriculum (English-Hebrew), and the impact of the virtual world on the Hebrew language knowledge, use and development/deterioration. Dr. Shapira teaches at Boston University. Rivka Weiner is Hebrew lecturer at Stern College for Women. Prior to arriving to stern College, Weiner was a teacher in elementary and middle school in NY. Weiner is a doctoral candidate at Azrieli Graduate school in Yeshiva University.

Anyone who has been engaged in teaching the Hebrew language in the Diaspora as part ofa Jewish education framework is aware of the difficulty of the challenge. Many students feel that the acquisition of the Hebrew language is irrelevant to them, because it is a language solely of the Jewish people who live in Zion. To address the motivational issue, we turned to the same technological tools that have become the main vehicle of communication in the daily life of the wireless generation. In this article we share with you the construction of a typical lesson-plan originally successfully used at the college level but which can easily be adapted to elementary through high school settings.

The lesson plan is structurally organized to create a multi-dimensional learning environment enabling multi-sensory learning, using concretization and diverse media such as text, color, images, movement, sound and links to simulations. These learning modes are adaptable to individual student’s needs, abilities and learning styles, creating self-motivation by instilling self-confidence/esteem that he/she is making progress in issues personally relevant and important to him/her (for example, one lesson focused on shapa-at [flu] because Swine flu was on everyone’s mind).The technology we use is freely available, accessible to every teacher, and easy to use.

Each unit begins with an out-of-class preparatory reading of a relevant text. Without proper guidance, students tend to translate every word individually but lose the meaning of the text itself. To avoid that and to shift the focus to comprehension, we prepare a computer-generated preparatory reading material. First, the title of the story/article is accompanied by pictures that frame the content they will be reading. In the text itself, words students already know appear in green and new words, usually not more than ten per article, appear in black. The use of colors reduces anxiety involved with seeing a new text and helps to assure that the students will not unnecessarily look up familiar words in the dictionary. Recorded audio is used to supplement the visual reading to assist those students for whom it would be helpful (students who do not want the audio can easily turn it off).

In class, a simple PowerPoint presentation is used to check for comprehension – from an overall understanding of the text to the meaning of individual paragraphs, and finally a focus on translating specific words. The answers appear on the screen only after the students have given their own answers to the questions. It is only at this point that we address the new words. This involves introducing related audio/video clips (these can be useful even if only a few seconds long), comics, photos etc., which include the new vocabulary. These short clips can be taken from YouTube or other websites, or even be created. When we show a video clip, the result is amazing! The video clip brings the outside, the real life, into the classroom. Students associate the specific words in the text to those which appeared in the video and to their own experiences.

At this time grammar is introduced. Once again short video clips are used. For instance, introducing the hitpa-el (reflexive) form, showing people mitatshim (sneezing) or mishta-alim (coughing) can be funny, and viewing various forms of people mitrahatzim (swimming/washing) in the pool, in the sea, in the river, in the shower reinforces not only the grammatical form but the flexibility of the language in various contexts.

Looking for similar structures can bring the students to learn the difference between nouns, adjectives and verbs from the same root. For instance, hom means heat, yesh li hom translates as “I have a fever,” lehammem means to heat up and mehummam is something that is heated, In this part of the lesson technology can be very useful. We can “dissect” the text in Word, choosing each time another term, and manipulating it within the sentence, without the need to rewrite it. Once again the students discover the meaning of the words from the context.

This is also a great opportunity to drill again and enhance the knowledge and use of the infinitive form of piel, which was learned earlier, and a sample of that form appears in the text on the shappa-at (e.g., lehammem [to heat], levakker [to visit], lehassen [to immunize], lekabbel [to receive/get]. Those words are reinforced in a podcast or vodcast (=video podcast), which serves as an aid in teaching/drilling of the infinitive form of this structure. Using simple tools like iMovie and Garage Band we were able to create a simple video in which the relevant infinitive forms pop up in close-up mode throughout the storytelling to increase memorization of the forms and understanding them within the context. [see Dania’s Vodcast at http://daniaspodcasts.blogspot.com/ (for Firefox) or http://daniaspodcasts.blogspot.com/2010/07/teaching-binyan-piel-infinitive.html (for Safari).

Games are a great tool for indirectly and actively repeating the learned material and acquiring learning skills, both in the classroom and at home. Teacher and students can create both memory games and matching games synonyms or opposites like gavoah and namukh, or drag-and-drop games (from a word bank), using ready-made modules online. In order for it to be entertaining, words can be moved from one place to another, or the student will be asked to retrieve the correct word from a group of words. It can be the teacher’s or the student’s decision. One can add sound and images, and adjust the learning level, with one sound for a correct answer and another for a wrong one.

There are wonderful resources at the Center for Educational Technology in Israel
(www3.cet.ac.il/english/pages/Home.aspx,where there is also a link for creating comics (http://ofek.cet.ac.il/OfekComics.aspx). Another valuable resource is Languages Online – Resources for Teachers (www.education.vic.gov.au/languagesonline/). An excellent free website (www.toondoo.com) allows for creating comics is in English, but one can use the Chinese bubbles to create in Hebrew. You can find there many images of children and adults, backgrounds, etc. (unfortunately, you can only use the given material, and cannot import to that materials from external resources).

There is an additional task for this unit, “Read for your own enjoyment”, of a text to be read at home, which reinforces what they have learned in the classroom. In the unit on shapa-at, we added a new dimension with a video clip about home remedies (trufot savta, literally, grandmother’s remedies) that addressed the remedies mentioned in the text. Another video clip summarizes the nature of shappa-at, how people get sick, and the advantages and disadvantages in getting a flu shot. You can attach a work sheet to the clip, and/or ask the students to report on the clip.

In addition, as part of their homework, they need to post on the class blog their responses to the various materials as well as to other students’ postings. They can also upload their related questions, photos, text, sound and video, which increases their engagement with Hebrew and enriches their ability to express themselves.

Almost all of the above can be created with free, user-friendly technological tools. Other programs (also free), such as Audacity for sound recording and editing and Soundslides for creating slide shows and movies add sophistication. MovieMaker and PhotoStory are Hebrew friendly, but work-arounds, such as embedding a Hebrew PDF generated in Word or Mellel, can be used for other programs.

Conclusion

Integration of technologies in teaching/learning the Hebrew language by itself does not guarantee success unless used wisely to achieve pedagogical advantages. At a recent conference, where part of the material described in this article was introduced, participant teachers complained that “it is too much work.” Unfortunately, good existing technology-based programs for learning Hebrew are sparse, and it is up to us to be innovative in order to create them. There are quite a few development opportunities for teachers who have the curiosity, motivation and yearning to learn to use the new technologies. MOFET (www.mofet.macam.ac.il/english/) provides onlines courses for learning to create new multimodal interaction programs using a ready-made module, or even to create their own module, which will serve as part of a language curriculum. It is time that the Jewish educational organizations would join the effort by providing once again free long-term development workshops for groups of teachers, in order to enhance teaching and learning Hebrew.