I hope you're enjoying the Educator spotlights and all the helpful tips we've been sharing! It's been inspiring to feature such a wide range of voices, including day school teachers, supplementary school educators, and (featured in this email) a rabbi who is both a master educator and an innovative Sefaria user.

If you’d like to revisit any of the past features or tips, you can always check out the Educator Newsletters collection.

If you have some pro tips you’d like to share in a spotlight of your own — or know someone you’d like to recommend — just reply to this email to let us know!

Who? Rabbi Scott Bolton, Spiritual Leader at Congregation Or Zarua in New York, NY

How? Sefaria helps make my tefillah journaling more text-based. When I’m reflecting on the power of the language in a certain prayer or writing about my tefillah experience, I can drop a liturgical phrase in Sefaria’s search bar and behold! There is a text that uses the same language or phrase that I had not thought about linking to a certain prayer I've been praying all my life!

Rabbi Bolton’s Top Tip: Use Sefaria’s interconnected infrastructure to make all your students into “investigator-readers.” With Sefaria up on a screen behind me, it’s easy to dive into an exploration of a text someone mentions during a class. I just pull up the passage they remembered and then use all the commentaries and hyperlinks to enrich our learning. Just like I used to run to the shelves of the Beit Midrash to find the right volume of a commentary I remembered — but on a screen.

Getting Oriented in the Library
You can use the structure of Sefaria's library to help students understand a text's relationship to the entire library and to appreciate the large scope of the Jewish library.

When introducing a new source, guide your students to it by clicking through the library page together. By going through this process instead of going straight to the text by typing the citation into the search bar, they will see the text’s relationship to the rest of the library. This helps develop an appreciation for the scope and breadth of the Jewish library.

Sefaria hosts several dictionaries learners can use to support and enrich their learning experience. To look up a word in one of the available reference works, just click on it! A dictionary entry will appear in the Resource Panel on the right side of the screen.

This works on Sefaria’s mobile apps, too, with an extended press on the word you’re looking up. In the app, the Resource Panel will open at the bottom of your device’s screen.

When students have definitions at their fingertips, they can work with a Hebrew base text more independently, only asking for help when they need it. Also, when multiple definitions are presented, students must look at the context to decide which is right for the particular verse, which encourages critical thinking skills.

When learning a mishnaic or talmudic text, you can click on a rabbi's name to read a short biography of the person in question in the Resource Panel. This is available for many figures mentioned in the Mishnah and the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmud.

To go even deeper, click on the rabbi's name in the Resource Panel! This opens the rabbi’s dedicated Topic page, where you’ll read even more information. In this way, you can get students into the habit of situating texts in a specific region and time period. This context helps deepen a learner’s understanding of the text.

Useful LinksThe Sefaria Classroom | Teach with Sefaria | Webinar: Sefaria + Google Docs | About Sefaria