Everybody knows that there are hundreds of words for snow in the Eskimo language for snow (which may not be entirely true) and that there are many words to describe the nuanced differences of pasta dishes in Italian (and as the joke goes, hundreds of nuanced words for an idiot in Yiddish), but in Hebrew one of the concepts which has many words attached to it, in order to grasp the various nuanced differences, is communication.

There are two distinct words I would like to discuss today: amira and haggada. Each of these words, technically, means to tell or say, but their deeper meaning is very significant to attaining a better understanding of communication and education.

The word amira from the root אמר carries the connotation of assimilating speech, or combining divergent parts into an assimilated whole. This understanding is drawn from the word’s phonetic cognates: עמר – to collect and חמר/המר – to heap. This is very important type of communication and it is a very high level of understanding. A person, while learning must see all things they learn as part of a ‘big picture’ and assimilate all new facts into this picture.

The word haggada from the root הגד, on the other hand, carries the connotation of separating an assimilated whole into its individual components. This understanding is drawn from the word’s phonetic cognates: גדד – to cut and גדה – to separate. This is also a very important type of communication and is crucial to a basic understanding of anything one learns. A person, while teaching, must always break each concept down to its core components for his/her students.

While teaching it is crucial to constantly be breaking concepts down into their core components and then showing students how these core concepts fit into the ‘big picture’.

This is the main difference between Prezi and PowerPoint and once we look at these two tools from this perspective it become clear that one is much better for use in education.

Prezi allows a teacher to work on one big canvas, zooming in and out to show relationships between ideas and how they all fit into the ‘big picture’, while PowerPoint is just a series of slides that show no context and no relationship. PowerPoint does not allow an educator to break concepts down into their individual components and show their relationship with the assimilated whole as Prezi does and this leaves much to be desired for an educator.

PowerPoint does have some cool animations though…

This post was cross-posted on YU 2.0.