Project Based Learning with Shakespeare

Another inspiring session I encountered was called Project Based Learning: Incorporating Technology into the Classroom. This program comes from Shade Gomez at Ithaca High School.

Mr. Gomez uses media projects to help his students understand Shakespeare. His students create projects, mostly digital projects, focusing on major themes, events, quotations, etc. from a Shakespearean play. I can't even get across to you how enthusiastic and deeply engaged these students were by viewing their projects. I was amazed with how much effort was put into each project, on Shakespeare nonetheless!

Mr. Gomez offers advice for this program:
-Get to know your librarians. They are experts in the digital world and with tools you'll need to help your students work and present.
-Find out what interests them, bores them, and gets them angry. They can develop a project off these items.
-The teacher must be excited about this! They will not be if you are not.

The program has the following components, which all serve as assessment:
1. Models: The teacher uses models from previous years to give students ideas that they can work with. They can brainstorm from these models. The models also serve as review for textual information.
2. Proposal: Students write the details of their project and what tools they will need for preparation and presentation.
3. Project: Students create project. I would have them continue to document their progress as they go along.
4. Presentation: Students show off their projects in oral presentation to the class, describing the process.
5. Reflection: Students respond to peer's work. I would also have them do self-evaluations.

Examples of projects, non-digital are posters, children's books, pop-up books, sculptures, statues, models, dioramas, t-shirts, fabric art, wood carvings, stitch-work, quilts, dolls, puppet shows, hats, vests, costumes, paintings, drawings, collages, bead work, board games, dances, and MUSIC.

For digital projects, students used Photo Shop to recreate scenes from a play, made their own movies, recorded their own music, made their own movie trailers, used animation, recreated movie scenes with video camera using games like The Sims and legos, etc.

Seeing these digital projects, I was FASCINATED at the amount of effort and skill level students put into them. They must have been so proud to complete these assignment, and they needed a lot of talent to make them! This project is great because students can use their talents to express themselves through creativity while analyzing the text to portray their project.

These projects could all be posted on the class' website. What better material to have on the site than actual student work! The teacher could post their digital projects, and then he/she could take still pictures of the other assignments and post those pictures. If a student performs in class, the teacher could record the performance and post that as a podcast. Imagine how much pride a student would feel if their performance or project was only a click away! They could show off their skills to others, making this project highly authentic.