The Shakespeare Pages

Anonymous — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:35:09 GMT

In my last post I mentioned a project I have been working on. It’s more-or-less done now so I thought I would write briefly about it here. I hope to develop it more, but as they say, it’s never done, just due. I developed this project for a Visual Literacies class I just finished at Northern Arizona University (online). The Shakespeare Pages Project is a website designed for high school or middle school English students. Its purpose is first to convince students that Shakespeare is not as boring or as hard to understand as they might think. The pages of the site are designed to not only persuade but also to engage teenagers’ curiosity. The project’s purpose is also to teach students about Shakespeare’s time, Elizabethan culture, the Globe Theater, and about the social class differences that divided citizens of 17^th Century England. The site is designed to integrate technology into the language arts curriculum as well, so another aim of the project is to provide students with opportunities to work individually and collaboratively on creating, publishing, and sharing digital documents via Google Documents, an online publishing and networking application.

I believe that the best learning activities are inquiry based, learning-centered, and are applied across the curriculum. This is what The Shakespeare Project was primarily designed to be. The first section of the website is designed to address preconceived notions about Shakespeare and to change teen’s attitudes about reading his plays. The lesson portion of the project is designed to engage students in a fun way that teaches functional, critical, and rhetorical thinking skills. All of this project should reflect the idea that the classroom of the 21^st century is not a stage from which the teacher will hand out information in paper packets and in lectures. Instead, the new classroom is a starting point, a “launch pad” and this Shakespeare Pages Project should function as a vehicle to take students and teachers back in time where they can explore and learn together about Shakespeare, Elizabethan culture and customs, and the Elizabethan stage.

Technology is an ever-expanding powerful tool that teachers can use to break down the walls of the traditional classroom. It is a tool that can be used to engage students and to help them develop essential skills for life in the modern world. I hope you’ll see The Shakespeare Pages as a useful example of how technology can be used toward these ends. Like any technology-based lesson plan, this project can easily evolve and change each year as new students arrive in September with different expectations and needs. I hope you like it and can use it in your classroom too. I’d love to hear what you think.

Enjoy,

^Scott

The Shakespeare Pages

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The Shakespeare Pages