Hebrew department pulls
2010Lamar, Strategic Communications
Allen Griffin Award
By Brian
The Director of Grants and Donor Advised Services, Jackie Wendland (Left), hands over the
Allen Griffin Award to Yaniv Oded (Right).
PRESIDIO OF MONTEREY,
Calif. - Twenty five years ago, an
Israeli guidance counselor diagnosed
Yaniv Oded, the son of Iraqi
immigrants, as dyslexic, predicting
that he would not be able to do well
in language classes.
After almost getting kicked out
of school as a child for flunking
Arabic, young Oded made a vow
to himself that he was not going
to let anyone tell him that learning
languages was a skill that he could
not master.
Oded has recently been awarded
with an Allen Griffin Award,
Monterey County’s highest teaching
award, and is working on his
fourth year as a Hebrew Language
Instructor at the Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center.
Since his meeting with the
discouraging counselor, Oded has
mastered Arabic, English, French,
Hebrew, Spanish and Turkish. Oded
went on to start a career in linguistics
when he joined the Israeli Defense
Force and worked for five years as a
linguist analyst in service to Israel.
Oded has also made a profession of
language instruction having taught
Arabic and French before coming to
DLIFLC to teach Hebrew.
Oded first signed on to
teach Hebrew at DLIFLC as a
contractor. “They gave me a sixmonth contract and when that was
finished, I signed another one. After
working as a contract language
instructor for that long, I decided
that I needed something more
permanent,” said Oded.
It didn’t take long for Oded to
realize that the students he was
teaching were a unique group. “The
troops are inspiring people. Many
of these students made a decision to
do something better for themselves.
They choose to do this for their
country,” said Oded.
Oded also realized that he
had walked into a job that put
just as much investment into its
faculty, as it does its students. “DLI
encouraged and sponsored me to
study after hours and helped me go
to CSUMB for a second Masters
degree in Instructional Science
and Technology,” Oded explained,
referring to California State
University Monterey Bay.
Oded has taken his newly gained
knowledge and has put it to use
in his school. While at CSUMB,
Oded’s capstone project was to
develop an application designed to
streamline administrative procedures
at DLIFLC, which has already
proved to save time and money.
“With this new application,
we have no misplaced documents,
greater security and privacy controls
because the system is Common
Access Card enabled and we are
looking at a 15 percent decrease in
time spent waiting on documents to
go through the normal distribution
system,” Oded explained.
Oded is also successfully
experimenting with classroom
curriculum by incorporating online/
real-time interaction, taking his
classrooms on virtual field trips,
building an electronic portfolio
systems for student documents and
turning a series of popular games
like Jeopardy and Snakes and
Ladders into electronic versions.
“While studying at CSUMB we
focused on interacting modules and
e-learning. That gave me the ideas
for some of my latest developments
in our school,” said Oded, adding
that he was also experimenting with
electronic testing platforms.
“I feel comfortable being creative
here at DLI. The leadership is very
supportive and I get all the support
and resources I need to fulfill my
project ideas,” said Oded.
Although the Allen Griffin
award is Oded’s highest teaching
honor thus far, the team he heads
has won the Team Excellence Award
twice, he was awarded two Coins of
Excellence and he was elected as the
Faculty Advisory Council President
for his school.
“I think of these awards as less
of an individual award and more of
an institution award because I could
not have achieved anything without
the support of my coworkers and
supervisors,” Oded said.
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