Smart Start – Drora Arussy
Gemara Berura – Tzvi Pittinsky
“Ready for Rashi” and More – Shlomo Schwartz

Smart Start
Drora Arussy

Smart Start is a company that provides language studies program developed by speech specialists at Random House and the Syracuse Language Institute. It aims to teach languages by working to improve listening, speaking and reading skills.

I use the Smart Start – Hebrew with my students. It is divided into topics including “People”, “Transportation”, “Home and Office” and more. Each topic has games and activities – including reading, listening and speaking activities – that encourage an understanding of the topic and an ability to express oneself about it. Some of the games are based on voice recognition software, ensuring proper development of pronunciation. In general, the bingo games are used to build vocabulary, while the conversations review the vocabulary on a more advanced level. While some of the activities are divided by level, most offer only one level of activity. The “conversations” that are offered have an option to speed up or slow down the speech.

This program may be used to introduce or summarize a vocabulary unit based on Ulpan units of study. One example is a unit on families. Before introducing my students to this unit, I had them work through a family tree on the computer by listening, reading and speaking the words in the family tree. Another game gave students the challenge of recognizing people by their descriptions in Hebrew. Finally, students had the opportunity to use some of the vocabulary words in a dialogue which they could read, listen to and eventually organize visually and orally.

The students enjoy the game component of this software which helps them develop their vocabulary and speaking skills. This unit is suggested for lower grades through a non-Hebrew speaking 8th grade, or up to a lower level high school. I find it to be a great springboard as we have now read stories, listened to a song and created a personal family tree using the vocabuary words from the family unit. Kids love to try to get their voices and pronunciation accepted by the computer and love the interactive mode of the games.

The Smart Start – Hebrew program can be used in classes from K through 8th grade.

Smart Start – Hebrew
Hebrew Language Training System for Adults
Media: CD-ROM
Version: Windows 95 and higher
Gemara Berura
Tzvi Pittinsky

There is a recognized problem in teaching Gemara. While in many schools more time is spent on Gemara than any other subject, even our most successful students often need to rely on a crutch such as Artscroll or Steinsaltz. Many students even develop a distaste for Talmud study. Why is it that students complete their basic Jewish schooling having mastered the skills to independently learn Tanakh but not Gemara?

In my own experience and my interviews with many other educators, I find the following factors contribute to the difficulty in mastering independent skills in Gemara.

1.Students have tremendous difficulty with the mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew found in the language of Gemara.

2.Besides the difficulties in Aramaic language, students also fail to understand the unique terminology found in the Gemara where key phrases often indicate complex functions.

3.Even equipped with a translation of the text, students fail to understand the unique structure of the Talmudic sugya. The Gemara uses a question and answer format, which might be familiar to law students and members of the school debating team but is foreign to most high school students.

4.Finally, the standard Vilna Shas lacks any punctuation.

Obviously these difficulties make the task of learning Gemara daunting to say the least. We expect our students to learn a text written in a strange language, containing a cryptic list of key words, with an unfamiliar structure, and without any punctuation whatsoever.

Gemara Berura successfully addresses each of these problems. It addresses the difficulties of language by helping students master the Aramaic without resorting to line-by-line translation. The program does this by providing a tool for recognizing all “keywords” appearing in the sugya and underlining them. Clicking on any underlined keyword brings you to a clear definition in English or Hebrew. Students learn to recognize and look for the key words in the text that unlock the structure of the sugya. In another useful tool students can receive an instant Hebrew translation to any Aramaic word appearing on the page simply by clicking on it. Yet another tool recognizes and highlights all the Talmudic sages that appear in the sugya. Clicking on a highlighted sage brings you to a brief biography of the sage.

With the help of the key words, literal translations, and biographies, students embark on a 3-stage sugya analysis process. They divide the sugya into segments, they classify each of these segments, and they connect the segments to each other. The unique structure of the sugya is impressed upon the students through the icons and flow charts they use in segment classifications. Every segment of text is classified into one of the 10 segment definitions, such as kushya- objection, or petiha – statement. Each of these 10 classifications has its own shape and color associated with it. Through these classifications, students realize that unlike the prose or poetry they are familiar with from Tanakh, the Gemara is a debate, containing objections, rejections, and proofs.

The colors and shapes associated with each classification also serve to “punctuate” the sugya. After dividing and classifying the text, students connect the classified segments by structuring them with an intuitive indenting system, such that each new level of the debate is illustrated by a further indent of the line. In this way, students have a color-coded and graphic representation of the sugya, allowing them to keep track of the argumentation, as well as distinguish the major threads of the discussion from its many tangents and free associations. One of the really remarkable features of Gemara Berura is that once you divide, classify, and connect the different segments of the sugya, the program automatically generates a flow chart, providing a top-down view of the whole sugya.

Gemara Berura’s strength is the fact that it is based on the same sound teaching methods that were used by many educators. What makes this program groundbreaking is the way it helps students accomplish this themselves, allowing them to successfully learn a Gemara with a minimum amount of frontal teacher involvement. The program will not allow students to succeed in reading through the Gemara perfectly on the first attempt, but they will have enough information to make an educated attempt to read the Gemara. Theoretically, each student can then bring his/her own personal reading of the sugya to the classroom. The teacher would then facilitate a debate over a final reading of the text that all students can agree on. This lends excitement to the learning by empowering the students to have their own personal opinions about the sugya; students care about what they are learning because they feel ownership of their sugya.

The ideal arrangement for introducing Gemara Berura into the Gemara class is when there is ready access to computers in the classroom. This would require the school to commit the necessary resources to install a Gemara Berura site license for the computer lab (or wireless laptop cart), and train the staff to employ this methodology. Students will then be able to interact directly with the program on a regular basis. They could prepare new sugiyot in the computer lab while actively engaged with their chavrutot, and review sugyot on their personal computers for homework.

In my own classroom, I have not yet been able to take all of my students to a computer room to use the program. I have used the program in other ways. With the use of a laptop computer and a projector I have taught this method while projecting it onto a screen in the front of the room. I have also used the program to create worksheets for students to learn with chavrutot. These particular worksheets have been very successful in reinforcing the understanding of keywords that appear in the Gemara. For example, through flowcharts students can see that every Hechei Dami is an inquiry, that is followed with an answer that is rejected and then followed by a second answer. In my most recent test almost every student was able to accurately explain Hechei Dami because of the work we did with Gemara Berura.

A basic question to ask before using the program is: In teaching Talmud, do you wish to focus on teaching skills or content? If your primary goal is to cover ground and give over lots of content, then the program’s focus on skills can be a drawback. However, if your commitment is to teach the students how to learn, then this program is worthy of your most serious consideration. By teaching the skills necessary for independent learning, students develop the ability to generate the content on their own over time. With its many tools and graphic organizers, Gemara Berura sets students up for lifelong success in learning Talmud.

“Ready for Rashi” and More
Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz

In my work as a third grade teacher I have incorporated the use of Jewish software into my class. My review of the programs here is presented from that vantage point.

First, I’d like to state one basic underlying principle. The computer is a tool – much the same as a blackboard or the copy machine. It can not replace the teacher (or the blackboard or the copy machine, for that matter)! It does have uses as an additional, exciting, and versatile way to present and test on material to be learned by the student.

Computer room setup is most important. We are most fortunate that in my school (Arie Crown Hebrew Day School, Skokie, Il) we have a computer room with enough computers that twenty students can easily be working on individual computers at one time. We also have a master switch that will turn off all monitors so students can pay attention to the teacher (and not the computer) when instructions are given.

Here are some of the programs that I use regularly:

Ready for Rashi
(Davka Corporation)

This program can be used as an introduction to the Rashi script and, if needed, can help in pointing out areas for remediation. The program is divided into four units:

I) Letters that the student would naturally recognize because of their similarity to standard block print,

II) Letters that are completely different than standard block print,

III) Confusing letters (alef and chet, etc.), and

IV) a unit on actually “decoding” a specific Rashi.

We use the software learning to supplement the classroom, and usually spend four sessions in the computer lab – one for each unit – over a period of about ten days. The students seem to enjoy learning the letters this way and master the one Rashi learned on the computer faster than the more traditional method.

Word Attack
(Goldman Computer Dept. of The Associated Talmud Torahs of Chicago)

Many Humash teachers put a heavy emphasis on the ability to dissect Hebrew words into their prefixes, suffixes, and root. The Word Attack program lets a teacher input a list of words with their correct divisions and translations. To begin, the students view a screen with a Hebrew word that they first must divide by clicking on the letters that compose a correct word segment (shoresh) They then are shown a screen containing the same word (with the previously chosen segment highlighted) and numerous possible translations for that segment. They must click on the correct translation for that specific segment. The process continues until all the words in the lesson have been answered.

The Teachers Menu gives access to the student’s score with a complete record of incorrect choices (and the correct answers). While this program was written a number of years ago and the interface is somewhat dated, it is extremely flexible in that it allows the teachers to enter their own words with their translation. It is a valuable tool for drills and testing, and its ability to provide a printed report to the student is a nice feature.

Master Teacher
(Dafka Corporation)

In addition to the student-oriented materials, Master Teacher (Davka Corporation) is a convenient teacher’s utility that I use on a weekly basis. Teachers input into a database a list of words, translations, and any additional information that they might want to use. Once the database is completed, the teacher, with a few clicks of the mouse, can automatically create Word Matches, Crosswords, Word Jumble Puzzles, Word Searches, Tests, and even Study Sheets printed out using the selected words. In my class the weekly Humash words usually begin with some of the easier puzzles, lead to a Matching, and finally, at the end of the week, to a test. Advantages to this program are that the database and corresponding work sheets can really be composed of any two matching facts (i.e. Rashi and location, two halves of a famous saying, etc.). The disadvantage of this program is that it currently does not support vowels with the Hebrew letters.

In conclusion, for any teachers who have hesitations about using the computer, we know that computers are part of the lives of our students. We are also very aware that more and more being “computer friendly” is going to be an integral part of our students secular education. Perhaps, now is the time to find ways to use this tool to improve the quality of our children’s Jewish education, as well.