Blowing the Shofar
Did you ever wonder why we blow 100 shofar sounds on Rosh Hashana? Are we commanded to do this by the Torah? In the Mishna? In the Talmud? Is it, perhaps, a later custom? You can see how the 9th grade students at Neveh Channah High School for Girls of the Ohr Torah Stone Institutions explain it. Just open your web browser and surf over to the web page, where you will find some of their answers: http://www.nevnet.etzion.k12.il/miriam/shofar/.
The title of this Hebrew page is “From Yom Teruah to 100 Sounds”, and it links to the 32 Microsoft PowerPoint Multimedia presentations created by the students of classes 9A and 9B. Two years ago, Mrs. Miriam Weitman’s Oral Law class studied the sources of the mitzvah of tekiat shofar on Rosh Hashanah. After completing their studies, teams of students worked on producing multimedia presentations showing how the Talmudic sages derived the mitzvah of Tekiat Shofar from passages in the Torah to our present-day practice of 100 shofar blasts. By clicking on any of the presentations you can see how the students understood this mitzvah. You may want to view more than one presentation in order to see how various teams chose to present their lesson.
What have the students gained by this activity?
Teachers at Neveh Channah attest to progress in a variety of areas:
•The students have restudied the material and reanalyzed it in order to decide how to present it logically and clearly.
•They have deliberated over how to best utilize the PowerPoint presentation software to present their lesson clearly, methodically and esthetically, and have carried out their plan.
•The product can be viewed by students to review their lessons or for others to learn the lesson from scratch.
•The students have transformed classical Torah knowledge into an up-to-date 21st century communications form that they use and understand freely.
The Shofar Project was not a one-time undertaking; it is part of an integrated “Information Literacy Program” initiated nearly seven years ago across the entire high school curriculum at Neveh Channah. Given the Information Age in which we live, it has become more difficult to master the sea of information which threatens to inundate us – which makes it critically important to train students to become “Information Literate”. They must learn how to efficiently locate, evaluate, cognitively process and clearly present information as valuable, understandable and easily usable knowledge.
To help guide our students to become independent “Life Long Learners” in an information glutted world, we have adopted the Big Six© Information Skills – an Information Literacy Problem Solving Process Model, as a central feature of our High School curriculum. The Big Six© Information Skills Model was developed by Dr. Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and has become a widely-used approach to teaching information and technology skills. The model consists of six steps used to carry out learning tasks as information problem solving activities. Each of these steps includes an element of integrating the task with information technology.
1. Task Definition – A teacher-designed assignment or problem statement can be posted on a web page or in an online class discussion area. To clarify the assignment, students may reply to the class bulletin board, send a private e-mail message, or discuss the assignment in a chat session with peers or with the teacher.
2. Information Seeking Strategies – Aside from traditional library search methods, available resources may include CD-ROM databases and online information. Students must have a search strategy, which includes a list of keywords and synonyms, a general subject, a phrase, and a combination of words and phrases using Boolean logic terms (AND, OR, and NOT).
3. Location and Access – If the student used keyword and Boolean Search strategies and makes use of technology resources, quantity will not be a problem. The predicament is how to narrow the search to find the most relevant sources. General references available on the Internet, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, are useful to find an overview of a given concept. On-line databases (such as RAMBI) as well as CD-ROM collections bring full text scholarly journal articles to our desktops at home and at school – even in Jewish studies. Students may use e-mail to contact experts and others interested in a topic by using the Ask an Expert web site, listservs, or Newsgroups.
Students learn how to zero in on the relevant information in each source.
4. Use of Information – The students relate the information they have found to what they already know, creating a clear picture of their research topic and its relation to their research question.
It is essential that students understand the concepts of copyright, plagiarism, and citation guidelines as they relate to electronic resources since it is so easy to cut and paste text from an on-line source or to download graphics from the Internet.
5. Synthesis – Technology gives students the opportunity to present their ideas electronically. PowerPoint, for example, is a powerful yet accessible tool with which students can exhibit their work. Technology formats such as HTML, E-Mail Attachments, and FTP allow students to publish artwork, text, and audio files on the Internet.
6. Evaluation – The teacher must offer an evaluation rubric that will give the student a clear idea of what is considered acceptable work for a given project. Both content and format need to be assessed along with the the research process itself. Self-evaluation and peer assessment help the students learn to strive for constant improvement.
Neveh Channah has trained faculty members, including teachers of English language, Science, and Limudei Kodesh, to use the Big Six© model. These teachers have become “in-house experts” in the use of telecomputing skills and instructional design whose job it is to initiate cooperative learning projects with curricular teachers. These projects are designed as “Information Problems”, which are then solved by having the students apply the Big Six© model. As students participate in these projects, which become more complex and sophisticated from project to project, they accomplish the following:
•Acquire and improve each of the Information Skills.
•Integrate those skills into a high powered Information Solving Process and learn to apply it effectively.
•Attain a high level knowledge and understanding of the subject material based on independent research and problem solving techniques.
•Become motivated to be actively involved in the learning process.
•Acquire collaborative skills, carrying out their project as part of a team.
•Learn to utilize computers to obtain, evaluate, process and present information from many different sources: hardcopy books and periodicals, local CD-ROM and distant online databases (internet), querying of experts (email list, online forums and news groups), etc.
•Learn how to evaluate their own projects and those of their peers by building and intelligently applying assessment rubrics.
Sample Projects
Tribe Inheritance Project
The Big Six© is implemented in Neveh Channah across the curriculum, so that Limudei Kodesh classes benefit from the innovative thinking and technological resources that are applied to all school subjects.
One 9th grade project was the Tribe Inheritance Project. The various teams chose one of Israel’s 12 Tribes and its inheritance (nachalah) in the Land of Israel. Each team studied the various chapters in the Tanach which described the events relating to the nachalah. The geographic attributes of each area, its archeology and its representation in art and music were examined. The students tried to find relationships between the various aspects of the inheritance. Finally, a multimedia presentation was created, including a layered map of the region, with each layer representing a different geographic aspect, (i.e. boundaries, topography, roads and settlements).
View an online description of the project here (in Hebrew):
http://www.nevnet.etzion.k12.il/nachalot.htm
Book of Joshua – Review Material
Not all of the Big Six© projects involve all the steps in the process. In the early part of the school year, only a number of the steps are emphasized. After all the steps have been introduced, learned and practiced, more complex projects are created that involve all the steps.
One of our first projects this year was preparing for the national exam on the Book of Joshua. We were looking for ways to make review for that test more interesting. The students were assigned to choose a topic in Sefer Yehoshua and study it, after which they had to compose 15 questions on the topic. The questions were written in an MS-WORD document containing forms, roll down multiple-choice questions, matching and other short-answer items. Each student included an answer key. Finally, the students’ materials were compiled and distributed to the entire grade to serve as an authentic study- guide for the Bekiut test. In essence, the students created their own review text.
See online assignments in Hebrew at http://www.nevnet.etzion.k12.il/tehilas/bekiut.htm
Jerusalem Neighborhood Project
One of the most interesting Big Six© projects that we have completed at Neveh Channah was the Jerusalem Neighborhood Project. Teams of 9th graders were assigned to produce PowerPoint presentations on different neighborhoods of Jerusalem for the school Yom Yerushalayim celebration. Each team chose its neighborhood, researched it thoroughly, learning about its physical geography, history (ancient and recent), its buildings and their residents. Information was collected from books and magazines, CD-ROM databases, online websites, visits to the neighborhood and interviews with its inhabitants. Cultural perspectives included viewing artwork and reading poetry and stories which described the neighborhood; teams also found popular songs relating to the area. All of these sources were analyzed and assembled as a stand-alone multimedia presentation which was meant to give the viewers a real taste of the neighborhood.
Vitamin and Human Body Project
An example of the application of The Big Six© to a 9th grade science project is the Vitamin and Human Body Project. The students played the role of researchers at a prestigious research institute. After studying articles about the effects of vitamin consumption on the human body, they were instructed to formulate a research proposal for presentation to the institute’s research committee, in order to receive one of the few grants available for financing their research. The proposal had to contain the question to be researched, as well as a survey of the theoretical background, facts, and research results that gave rise to the question.
A list of web sources for the project (a webliography) was provided on Neveh Channah’s web site:
http://www.nevnet.etzion.k12.il/nutrition.htm
The “Information Literacy” framework at Neveh Channah encourages a cooperative, progressive teaching atmosphere among the entire staff. The IL staff initiates projects with all of teachers in the school – Limudei Kodesh as well as general studies teachers – creating innovative, challenging activities. Students become motivated, independent learners, capable of solving sophisticated, real-life information problems in varied curricular areas. The administration of Neveh Channah and Ohr Torah Stone has allocated considerable resources in initiating this project and encouraging its development within the school curriculum. We hope to continue to possess the imagination, inspiration and determination to develop and improve the program in the years ahead.
See the Big Six©Website to learn more about the model – http://www.big6.com/. See the Neveh Channah website in Hebrew to learn about its application at Neveh Channah http://www.nevnet.etzion.k12.il/thebig6.htm