Using the Web for Passover Prep

In case you are looking for some last minute Passover lesson ideas for the few days of school left before Passover, I am republishing my blog post from last year below. This post features a simple Passover WebQuest which might be worthwhile for your students.

I also recommend the following more recent links:

• Pesach Resources from the Lookstein Center: A list of original Pesach lesson plans, project ideas and articles created by Lookstein Center staff or contributed to site by Jewish educators.
• Yeshiva University's Pesach To-Go 5771: Pesach articles on Halakha and Machshava from various Roshei Yeshiva from YU.
• Giving a Haggadah a Makeover: Article from the New York Times about Maxwell House's attempt to redo their classic Haggadah with a gender-neutral translation. Personally, I object to to this; "the 4 different sorts of children" does not resonate the way "the 4 sons" does. However, it is worth reading and might be a subject for an interesting class discussion about the role of translations in interpreting our Jewish liturgy. 
• http://www.amit.org.il/hagim/pesach/hagada.htm: Link to many Haggadot and commentaries.
• Full Hebrew text of the Haggadah  

Here is my posting from last year. I invite people to add more Passover links in the Comments to this posting.
A number of years ago, I started creating Internet scavenger hunts where students were asked a series of questions like a standard worksheet which they could only use specific websites to answer.

My goal was two-fold: 1) to introduce students to various Jewish websites and illustrate their usefulness in answering real world problems and 2) to create hands-on activities for students to discover the answers to halachic questions themselves instead of the boring lecture style so common for classes in Jewish law. I felt that as a Torah teacher who wanted to foster life-long learning in my students, I could not guarantee that they would always have access to Jewish teachers or seforim especially when living on college campus. But I knew that they would always have access to the Internet. If they realized that they could use the Internet to help answer questions as advanced as "How to kasher your kitchen for Passover?" and as basic as "When is Shabbat candle lighting this week?" then this might just strengthen their Jewish identity and their ties to Talmud Torah and Shemirat Hamitzvot. I also wanted to point them to legitimate Jewish websites and resources since unfortunately so much online is still of questionable origin and dubious authority.

Two of my worksheets appear below. The first is a pretty high level worksheet on the laws of Passover based mostly on one of my favorite websites both for Jewish content and it's fun sense of style kosher4passover.com.

Here it is:
Internet Worksheet on Hilchot Pesach

The second is a more basic Internet Jewish Scavenger Hunt designed for students of all levels.
Here it is:
Internet Jewish World Scavenger Hunt

Please feel free to share these with your own classes and tell me how it goes. Happy Passover and Chag Sameach!