Macbeth Set Free

Folger Education entered  new territory on Tuesday February 15 with the beginning of Macbeth Set Free, an online course for teachers. With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and New York Institute of Technology, we are able to reach teachers across the country with some solid approaches for teaching Shakespeare.

When we planned the course, we were careful to keep it as interactive and lively as possible.  We are using Moodle as the course management system for discussions and posting handouts and lessons. The eight live sessions will use Elluminate and feature prepared video of students demonstrating some activities and video from the highly praised Folger Macbeth DVD. Those teachers who are participating will use their webcams and microphones to ask questions and participate in some of the activities.

When we announced the course in January, we had a flood of requests, but we had to halt the registration to 30 participants. Those who enrolled represent 23 states, and each teacher received a copy of the Folger Toolkit.

A different instructor will lead each class in the coming weeks. Here are the teachers who are presenting:

Week 1–Bob Young and Mike LoMonico, Folger Shakespeare Library

Week 2–Chris Renino, Scarsdale (NY) HS

Week 3–Kevin Costa, McDonough School, Owings Mills, MD

Week 4–Sue Biondo-Hench, Carlisle (PA) HS

Week 5–Jaime Wong, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional HS, Sudbury, MA

Week 6–Chris Shamburg, New Jersey City University

Week 7–Amy Ulen, Tumwater (WA) HS

Week 8–Bob Young and Carol Kelly, Folger Shakespeare Library

While the class is closed, here is a recording of the first session.

This is the first of what we trust will be many more Web-based professional development sessions. If you have any suggestions for future Webinars or courses, please add your comments below.

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare 2.0

It didn’t take teachers too long to realize that they could access all of Shakespeare’s plays in places other than books.

In the early days of computing, that meant loading a play from a floppy disk:

although it took lots of them to upload the Complete Works.

Later they were available on smaller disks:

but that was equally tedious.  Then came the World Wide Web, and soon enterprising techies were posting a variety of versions of the plays–mostly for free. And now lots of Shakespeare sites are available.  Here are a few:

MIT Shakespeare was one of the earliest resources and many teachers still use them. I’ve discovered lots of errors on this site, so now I avoid using it. My guess is that many users are impressed by the MIT name, but that’s not a good reason to use it.

Bartleby uses the 1914 Oxford Shakespeare edition which is in the public domain as its source. Its advantage is that it has line numbers.

Shakespeare Online has lots of extra features and lots of annoying ads.

Open Source Shakespeare is based on the Globe edition and in addition to the plays,  includes a concordance, keyword and advanced searching, and statistics.

The Works are available in HTML editions from Wikisource, without version attribution.

PlayShakespeare.com calls itself “the ultimate free Shakespeare resource,” and is primarily a presentation of the texts with some ancillary materials.

The Complete Works from the etext library at the University of Adelaide.

The Project Gutenberg texts of the Complete Works are also available.

And my personal favorite–though it doesn’t allow you to access the complete plays–is Shakespeare Searched. It’s the perfect tool for teachers.

Now tell us which source you use most.

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare Goes to High School (the Movie!)

As the movie industry continues to reinvent itself, Shakespeare has been a mainstay amidst developing trends.  King John was one of the first silent films, and Taming of the Shrew one of the first to receive a soundtrack. Shakespeare’s characters have even found themselves reinvented as high school students in teen movies! Similarly, as technology has taken root as a vital tool in education teachers have used Shakespeare on film to enhance their lesson plans. The disadvantage to this is that film is a passive learning tool, and if only one film is presented then students tend to think that there is only one way to interpret a single play. However, the range of interpretations of one play in the hands of different directors and actors lends itself to discussions about the text for students who regularly entertain themselves at the movies.

Showing the same scene as interpreted by different directors displays how adaptable Shakespeare’s text is. For example, screening the scene in which Petruchio and Katherine meet in the 1929 “talkie,” again in the 1967 Zeffirelli-directed film, and again in the 1999 teen-adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You, students can develop a conversation about the ranges of interpretation open to Katherine’s resistance to Petruchio’s advances. To jumpstart discussion, try keeping the text in front of students while they watch to have them circle the words the actors choose to emphasize, and note the actors’ physicality and body language.

Filmmakers re-visit Shakespeare again and again because there is always another direction to take his work.  Plays can be done with lutes (Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet) or with rock songs (Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet).  They can take place in a castle (Oliver Parker’s Othello) or in a classroom (Tim Blake Nelson’s O).  They can be done without cuts (Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet) or with wild interpretation (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet).  Discovering broad choices on film makes for a richer classroom discussion.

For more ideas on using film in the classroom, check out Mike LoMonico’s article for PBS.

Read Full Post »

Brave New World

Welcome to “Making a Scene: Shakespeare in the Classroom.” We’re extremely excited to launch into the blogosphere, and hope you’ll join us as we collaboratively share ideas and strategies about what’s working in your classrooms. 

Our founding Head of Education, Peggy O’Brien, has often said, “Teachers do the most important work in the world.” As your educational partner, we certainly believe that’s true. 

In addition to offering online resources from lesson plans to podcasts at www.folger.edu/education, we’ll be using this blog to let you know what’s new at Folger Education, give perspective on national trends, announce new resources, and have an ongoing conversation with you on how to make studying Shakespeare fun and successful for students of all ability levels.

In March of this year, we partnered with PBS to present a webinar on “Classroom 2.0” and ways that technology can be integrated with the study of Shakespeare. Hundreds of teachers from across the country participated and confirmed what we’ve already seen to be true: learning is a dynamic process. When technology is used in conjunction with our performance-based teaching philosophy (“learning by doing”), the results are often dramatic and very successful. Watch our “Remixing Shakespeare” video for just one example of this approach in action.

How are you planning on using technology in your classrooms this year? What obstacles do you face? For those of you who have already tried it, what results have you seen? Is it an effective hook for students who may think they dislike literature, but love making YouTube videos?

We look forward to hearing your responses. Learning is all about discovery, and we hope that you’ll share yours and your students’ throughout the year ahead.

- Robert Young
Director, Folger Education

Read Full Post »