Technological Exploration of Bible Stories

As a new program at our religious school, we have moved towards project based learning. Next year’s big idea will be the Torah. Due to this, I decided to make my project an exploration of the Torah stories. My goal for the project was to assign each student one of the better known stories from the Torah, and to have them create a presentation that they can proceed to share with the class.

To start, I will use www.randomizer.org in order to fairly assign the students a story from the following list:


Creation
Adam & Eve
Cain & Abel
Noah’s Ark
Tower of Babel
Sodom & Gomorrah
Binding of Isaac
Jacob & Esau
Joseph
Moses

They will then be tasked with reading the portion in which their story takes place (or compiled excerpts based on the length.) I will point them towards http://www.biblegateway.com in order to find an online copy.

Once they've absorbed the material, they will be asked to create a graphic, using either wordle or tagxedo and the text from the passage. They will be asked to write a short analysis of why they think some of the words were so common.

Their next task will be to create a summary of their passage, and to use voki to present it.

Following that, they will be asked to use http://www.timetoast.com/ in order to create an interactive timeline of the passage. They will be required to include descriptions with each plot point, as well as a minimum of 3 images.

For the final presentations, they will be asked to dress as a character from their passage. They will then share the passage with the class, and they will present their word clouds, vokis and timelines.


Through this each student will have at the very least a rudimentary grasp of the stories.