Welcome to the final lesson in Sefaria’s Educator Training course! We hope that you’ve enjoyed your journey through Sefaria’s features. We appreciate your time, energy, and feedback throughout this course. In this week’s lesson, you will learn about some of the new and upcoming developments at Sefaria, as well as how to take your Sefaria skills to the next level.
1) Sefaria works in Hebrew - and exists in Israel!: If you teach in a setting such as an Ivrit B’Ivrit school, or you have Israeli colleagues, it may be useful for you to use Sefaria in Hebrew. Our setting menu allows you to select Hebrew (as well as set other preferences for how you view Sefaria) and use the site in the language of your choice.
We know that many American educators seek out opportunities to learn with and from Israeli colleagues. Whether you and your students travel to Israel, communicate regularly with schools in Israel, or are simply interested in learning about educational technology and Jewish studies curricula in Israel, we want you to know that Sefaria has a team in Israel. Hedva Yechieli, our Education Coordinator in Israel, is in the process of connecting with Israeli educators and adding materials from Israeli schools to our site. We are excited that Sefaria will be a community for Americans and Israelis to build educational resources together, and we welcome your input and participation in this process.
In Israel we have worked with CET to create a course for educators that qualifies them to receive microcredentials. For those interested in the Hebrew language course, a short preview (in Hebrew) is below.
2) Upcoming Projects: In the last class, you learned about our pedagogy group, which will be publicly available soon. This group is part of a larger initiative designed to encourage teachers to create and model effective digital integration using Sefaria in the Judaic studies classroom. We know that educators increasingly look to Sefaria’s resources not only for teaching materials, but also for information on how best to leverage digital technology in the classroom. We invite you to partner with us in creating these materials. Perhaps you will create and share a lesson plan or two, or perhaps you will create a group and invite colleagues to join you in developing materials on Sefaria. Whatever you do, we would love to hear about it, and support you in your work.
3) Final assignment: Click here for the final assignment! Instead of a Sefaria assignment, this week we’ve asked you to send us some feedback on the course via SurveyMonkey. You will automatically get full credit for this assignment by completing all fields in the survey.
As a reminder, all participants who complete the course with a score of at least 80% will receive certification as Sefaria educators! Please send an email to [email protected] when all of the lessons are complete.