Google Docs is a tremendously powerful tool for use in and out of the classroom.

The first layer of its awesomeness comes as a function of its creator’s software-philosophy, namely the fact that it – and all the files a user creates and edits – live entirely in the cloud; this makes it accessible from anywhere with internet access (and hopefully soon, with the re-introduction of offline mode, just anywhere – hint hint, Google) and means that work is never lost to crashes, hardware damage or even the occasional ravenous canine.

The next layer of awesome comes in the form of Google Docs’ real-time collaboration, which means that students and teachers – whether they are sitting next to each other or half-way around the world – can work on a document at the same time, see each other’s work and chat using the in-document chat module. This is also an amazing tool for teachers to monitor student work and catch mistakes as they happen rather than only after the project has been turned in, it reduces the number of necessary revisions and allows students to learn in the moment – when they can actually make use of the lesson – rather than hours or days later, when the lesson may no longer be relevant to them and therefore may not  be internalized. This nifty feature also comes with an unexpected bonus, revision history, which allows users to see all the revisions made to a document by any of the users who are editing, this makes reverting back to an old version of the document a snap and allows teachers to see who has been logging the most hours on a given project and when those hours have been logged (“I know it looks like I just did it this morning, but I swear, I worked on it all weekend!”).

Finally, for the Judaic classroom, Google Docs has the best RTL and Hebrew support I have seen in a non-Israeli word processor. It always gets the orientation right from a copy-paste and nearly-always gets the nikud correct from copy-paste text. It is so good, that I often use it as a filter between Hebrew websites and other inputs (like Smart™ Boards or Powerpoint).

Using these and other awesome features of Google Docs, I have crafted three tools to be integrated into lessons for use in the classroom:

Beginner

By leveraging the collaboration and commenting features of Google Docs, I developed a lesson for teaching textual skills with a strong focus on root-word identification and sentence structure. I have implemented this lesson for teaching Chumash and Rashi skills to high-school freshman.

Goal: Get students to work together to translate texts and learn how to use root-words to aid their ability to do so.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to use and find it on mechon-mamre.org.
• Copy the block of text you want to use and insert it into a new documents. (Tip: hold down ctrl/cmd+shft+’v’ to insert text without any formatting)
• Divide the text up into logical sections based on the number of groups in your class. Insert page-breaks after each section, placing each section on its own page. Now title each section with the name of the group or students who will be working on each section.
• Make the document accessible to your students. You can either make the document open to anyone with a link (which means that some students may edit the document anonymously, but makes getting started easier) or share with students individually to their Google Account. See here: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=180199 for more on sharing.

In The Classroom:

Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise and how root-words can aid in translating texts. Now show them the three things which they will be required to do:

1. Locate the verbs in the text
2. Identify the root-word of those verbs and translate them using the comment feature (highlight the word and hit ctrl/cmd+alt+’m').
3. Translate the entirety of the text beneath the Hebrew.

These three things must be done in order and should be done as a team, the classroom should be loud and students should be arguing over what is and isn’t a verb, what the root-word is and what it means.

While the students are diligently working on their group’s section, you should be viewing the document as well. You should be keeping a careful eye on what they are doing and their comments, trying to catch incorrect work as it happens.

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

Intermediate:

By using the same features as the above lesson, as well as hyper-links and nested comments, I was able to create a virtual chabura and hyper-text document for students to study together.

Goal: Create a document which would allow students to learn a text in context, to see the primary sources being quoted, and emulate a chabura learning environment virtually.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to study and enter it into the document. In this case we used Iggeret Ha’Ramban.
• Identify primary sources used in the text (eg. psukim, quotes from the talmud) and locate them online (good sources are http://mechon-mamre.org/ and http://hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx).
• Link the quotes to their primary sources using hyper-links.
• Make the document accessible to your students (see above).

In The Classroom:

Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise, and introduce the text. Show the students how to use the comments feature (see above) and instruct them to begin learning the text on their own, leaving comments where they feel appropriate, also encourage them to comment on each others comments and ask and answer questions in the comment section. This should lead to an organic conversation about the text.

As before, involve yourself in the conversation, but do not be as heavy-handed as the last lesson. This is a place for students to discuss and learn on their own to learn from each other, you can guide the conversation, but let them shine!

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

Advanced:

The final lesson is actually fairly basic from a technological perspective, it doesn’t really use any of the advanced tools of Google Docs, outside of real-time collaboration, but it’s subject matter is more advanced than the previous two exercises. Based on Hirscian linguistic theory that words which share phonetic similarity (phonetic cognates) also share core meaning, I devised this lesson to visually show high-school seniors word structure based on phonetic linguistics.

Goal: To have students dissect a text collaboratively based on the phonetic breakdown of words and visually show them the connection between words.

Preparation:

• Identify the text you want to use, or list of Hebrew words. Enter it in to the document.
• Assign each student (or group of students) a category of Hebrew letter and color. The 5 categories are:
1. Gutturals: ע – ה – א – ח
2. Palatals: ג – י – כ – ק
3. Dentals: ד – ת – ט – ל – נ
4. Labials: ו – ב – פ – מ
5. Sibilants: ר – ז – ש – ס – צ
• Make the document accessible to the students (see above)

In The Classroom:
Once you have all the students in the classroom and logged in to the document, explain to them the basic premise of the exercise, and introduce the concept of phonetic cognates. An amazing resource in this area is The Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew: Based on the Commentaries of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.
Now, have the students begin highlighting their letters in the respective colors. Soon they will begin seeing patterns emerge from the text, encourage them to discuss these theories. Close the lesson with a discussion of the patterns they identified and the significance of core meanings and phonetic cognates.

Being that student emails are used in this document, I will not post a link here. Please comment if you want access and I can share it with you.

I hope this post opened you up to the possibilities of Google Docs in your Judaic classroom, please keep me posted with your innovations in using this phenomenal tool in the comments below!

This post was cross-posted on YU 2.0.