Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers”

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:13:45 GMT

Hello fellow teachers and tech integration enthusiasts. I’m back from a short break. A major project in my graduate class has kept me away from blogging for nearly two weeks. The good news is I’ve been developing an interactive Shakespeare website I’ll soon be able to introduce here. For now, I’ve got another interactive text to tell you about. It is part of “Interactives” by Annenberg Media—a collection of lessons which span across the curriculum and that are meant to “enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas.” These activities range from 3D Geometry and History to the subject of this blog—Language Arts. Only four Language Arts “Interactives” are available at this time, but it is easy to imagine connections between Language Arts and some of the activities in other subjects such as history. For example, anyone teaching Marlowe or Shakespeare might find the Renaissance Interactives in the history section very useful.

Of particular interest for those of us in high school Language Arts, the Interactive version of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is a good one. It is a simple website with no frills but well-designed interactive elements that teach some of the basic literary elements of short fiction. Because the story is in the public domain, audio versions of it are easy to find on the web too, along with recordings of the stage version (called Trifles). I’ve provided some links below.
When you arrive at the site, click the wooden door on the right to delve into the murder mystery. Throughout the story, there are points where the reader can click an icon to explore a literary term such as Point of View which is the first one you will come across. When a reader clicks this icon, he or she is taken to a separate section where the concept is explained and applied to the story in the form of a series of engaging questions. Once the reader has explored the section about that particular literary term, she is directed back to the story and may continue reading. There are several literary terms to learn about before the end of the story.

Navigation is easy because each page offers icon links to continue on with the story or to return to the main page. The icons are illustrations which complement the story. The site is a bit plain visually, so it might be easy to overlook this valuable resource. However, what this site may lack in aesthetic design, it makes up for with its engaging lessons—it’s a great way to teach the elements of plot with a chilling murder mystery online. With each of the literary elements the reader is given an opportunity to not only read the definition of the term but to actually apply it to what she is reading too.

My only disappointment with the site is that there is no place for students to take notes or to record their answers to the questions posed about the story. An easy fix for this is to have students open Google Documents accounts and create a document where they can record their answers. This way it would be easy then to have them work collaboratively, share their ideas, and submit their work to you online while reading the story. Tabbed browsing is great for this kind of multitasking.

In spite of its graphic simplicity, the Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers” is a site worth bookmarking and adding to your list of Interactive Language Arts resources. It isn’t as flashy as other digital textbooks, but it is useful and it meets my requirements for being interactive and not just multimedia. The last page of the story also provides some links for more information about the author, literary criticism of her work, and other related resources.

On a final note, you may want to stick to reading this one with upper-classmen and AP students or you may need to provide basic readers with support, because the story is mostly appropriate for advanced readers. Even some of my honors-level freshmen struggled to understand all the subtleties of the story, so you’ll want to plan ahead for this.

Enjoy…

^Scott

Links:

Audio Version of “A Jury of Her Peers”

Audio Version of “Trifles,” the play version of the story

Interactive Shakespeare: A Really Cool, Totally Free Digital Textbook

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 03:48:18 GMT

November 23, 2010

It’s not hard to find Shakespeare resources on the internet. In fact, in a way it’s too easy, so teachers are often left to sift through thousands of bland websites in search of a unique and useful one. When I searched “Shakespeare Lesson Plans” on Google today, it garnered me more than 400,000 results. It’s hard to know where to start. But then I came across one that I think is especially remarkable, one that exemplifies everything I think of when I consider the term “interactive” in language arts. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) Interactive Folio and Study Guide: Romeo and Juliet is one of the finest interactive resources I’ve come across in my search for truly interactive language arts resources. This is how CASP describes it on their site:

“The Interactive Folio and Study Guide is the result of two years of research and design work by the CASP team to make use of its extensive expertise in both rethinking multimedia design contexts and creating substantive content for online dissemination. Effectively, the Interactive Folio and Study Guide is a new form of book, E-book, and hybrid online publication that is a an innovative new web resource giving users free access to a huge array of materials presented in an exciting, new, and wholly original interface (designed from the ground up by the CASP team).”

Yeah, it’s pretty cool. You’ve got to check it out.

The Interactive Romeo and Juliet offers a multimedia edition of the play that is engaging and very helpful for English teachers presenting the play to their classes and for students who are trying understand the text…but it does not dumb things down…it enhances them with pop-up commentary, embedded resources, audio, and video. And those resources are substantial. It will take you a while to explore them all, and they are all professionally designed and produced.

In the prologue, for example, clicking the word “prologue” activates a video clip from Madden’s and Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (the academy award winning film) that reenacts the play in the richness of a perfectly recreated 16^th Century England and a Rose theater reconstructed to spark the imagination. Kids love watching this clip because it pulls you into Shakespeare’s world and immerses you in it. Clicking the word “Two” in the first line activates an audio recording of Canadian actor Devin Pihlainen gracefully reciting the prologue. Other digitally enhanced elements include lexicon notes that explain terms like “ill-fated” and “misadventured,” making Shakespeare accessible for even the most remedial of readers. And perhaps most importantly, it presents Shakespeare in a new textual form—in a digital medium familiar to so many students toting iPhones and laptops. Interactive Romeo and Juliet is a really cool, totally free, digital textbook.

I can imagine supplementing the class reading with chosen passages or, if you have the available technology, reading the entire text on the computer with your classes. For closer reading and study, the “resources” section includes character descriptions, plot synopses, facts about the play, current research, and even interviews with Shakespeare scholars like Sky Gilber, Assistant Professor and University Research Chair. Do check your computers ahead of time as Adobe Flashplayer 8.0 is required.

The depth of resources on this web site is incredible. I spent over an hour and hardly explored a fraction of the content. It is really an entire online course of significant depth on Romeo and Juliet presented in highly engaging multimedia formats.

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination with this resource. If you don’t have time, however, to dream up lessons to complement the Interactive Romeo and Juliet text, the “Learning Commons” section provides dozens of lesson plans complete with teacher and student instructions, worksheets, and other printable resources. The worksheets and other printable resources are high quality, professional documents that would cost a lot in a textbook package. Here they are available for free to print or download.

My one bit of advice about exploring the Interactive Romeo and Juliet is to give yourself some time. If you are like me when I first discovered this site, you’ll find you’ve spent an entire prep period and a study hall without looking away from the screen. I think you’ll find this website is one you come back to every year to explore Romeo and Juliet with your students.

http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/folio.html

Enjoy,

^Scott

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Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers”

Interactive Shakespeare: A Really Cool, Totally Free Digital Textbook