B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum

I'd like to find out whether the kinds of techniques I'm using to teach in Sunday school and some of the other techniques we discuss here could be used to teach beginners in an online forum. Suppose we wanted to try walking through the first part of the Gospel of John, teaching Greek along the way, asking questions in Greek and asking for responses in Greek - are there people who would be interested in giving that a try?

I would probably set this up so that people could write their answers either in the chat channels, where messages disappear after a period of time, or perhaps in a slack channel (a kind of online chat that developers often use).

If we do this, people who do the lesson might wind up watching us talk about how to create a useful lesson in the main forum, then trying out the lesson to tell us how well it worked here in the beginner forum.

I'm in!

If we do a Biblical book, let's do Mark's Gospel and let's write leveled readings for segments.

I think Lightman already did some leveled readings from Mark, but I can't find it quickly (Textkit). Here's a different leveled reading he did.

http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... ed#p154976

I'd love to have you involved!

I'd like to use John for practical reasons - I have to teach a lesson out of John once a week, using much of the same material, and I don't have time to do a different book than the one I'm using for Sunday School.

Leveled readings could be very useful for some of this. I would probably use them as a way of ramping up to the original sentences when they are complex.

I'm game!

Looking forward to it!

Patrick

I would like to participate as well...

I would love to participate in this group. I'm currently teaching a class on Mark. But most of my teaching development of NT passages is based on the gospel of John.

I am willing to participate in this if, or as, my schedule permits.

OK, I'm learning how to do a screencast, and asked a few people for feedback on my first attempt. I will work on a first installment for some time next week or so.

Jonathan

I'd be interested in trying this.
And if you'd like simple illustrations - like I did for Susan Jeffers' ὁ ἀδελφος και ἡ ἀδελφη
(black and white, simple figures)
Shirley Rollinson

OK, some really, really great people have volunteered, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to organize this. We could set up a sub-forum for this, that would help keep things a little more organized, separating the teacher's area from the lessons themselves and a chat area for students to ask questions.

Ideally, students should be listening, speaking, reading, and writing from the beginning. A phpBB forum does well for reading / writing, not for listening and speaking. I could set up the forum so that we can upload audio files, and we can already link to audio files or Youtube clips. Worksheets are also really useful. I suspect the forum might be best as a quick-and-dirty place to pull things together, and we might want to reorganize the materials as a web site either as we go or later.

I want to focus on authentic biblical texts. Leveled reading can be useful as a way to work up to a complex sentence, and we should use various scaffolding techniques, but the text itself should be the main focus. Students should respond actively in some way from the very beginning. Figuring out the right scaffolding technique for a given text is part of the challenge.

Teachers are going to need a way to talk out ways of presenting a language, that's going to be messy, and a little distracting for students. But I'd rather have that discussion out in the open in a teacher's lounge, then present what we come up with to the students piece by piece. In the student's area, we'll have to resist the temptation to go off in areas that are beyond beginning students.