TIP of the day: teacher helping student - Catholic, Lutheran, Messianic Jew ... & community tags

MJ. Smith

When facilitating a class, one responsibility of the teacher is to make the material accessible to the student. This requires that you have a sense of what your students know and don't know. One major way you can make material accessible is to make definitions of difficult or technical terms readily available - definitions that are applicable to the context in which the word appears. Community tags create the links for hover information and in the context menu - Bible dictionaries and Factbook.

Three examples and the reasoning as to why the term might need a community tag.

1. Prophets and Apostles in a Catholic small group study guide  for adults that should be accessible to most English speaking in a parish. Early in the first lesson Hananiah is mentioned. Because most will know him as Shadrack, a Community tag for a hover information pane is appropriate.

2. An inquiry class using the Complete Jewish Bible could easily be lost in the forest of unusual spellings of Biblical names in the Complete Jewish Bible. By using Community tags to link to the Hebrew name to the common English name would help students make the transition. I would add tags only to those passages I was using in class. ... and pressure Faithlife to enhance their synonym support so that the Bible tagging more consistently linked in the CJB.

3. When using the Book of Concord for confirmation preparation one can assume a fair level of familiarity with Luther theological terms, the wording of creeds, etc. But church history prior to the reformation is apt to be a week point. Creating Community tags for historical groups creates a link to the Factbook where the student should be able to find extended definitions that are appropriate to their age and spiritual maturity.

Note: this post is an indirect answer to a question asked of me on the forums today.

James Taylor

Note: this post is an indirect answer to a question asked of me on the forums today.

And a useful one indeed. Thanks MJ. I can now see some scenarios in which adding community tags will be helpful.