Clay Burrell has an energy for teaching that is infectious – better still he’s full of good ideas.
His new WordPress powered blog has a growing number of teaching resources that use read/write web technologies and collaborative learning strategies in engaging and purposeful ways. Among them is a link to his AP Literature class project, King Lear Street Talk, in which students publish their version of Shakespeare remixed for a modern audience. He describes the project as: “We’re still trying to do something interesting by translating Shakespeare’s incredibly difficult but holy King Lear into contemporary English with a mafia twist … Think Shakespeare meets The Sopranos. It’s on a wiki, which we’ll hopefully then record as a serial radio drama podcast, and make into a graphic novel with ToonDo. Fingers crossed.”
Image: http://www.bigforksummerplayhouse.com/Complete%20Shakespeare%20abridged.jpg
Fingers crossed indeed. Thanks for noticing. There’s some talk among other readers of starting a global collaborative library of “Shakespeare Street Talks” (which we can rename if needed), contributed by classes around the world doing different works by the Bard.
Possible, too, to have other schools edit and polish the translation my students are doing of Lear this year, for example, or cartoonize it or radio theater podcast it if we here in Seoul can’t make time for it this year.
Mashing up wikis with other schools, in other words, is where I’m hoping this can all go. Interested?
Because my class isn’t 1:1, doesn’t have Comic Life or Garageband, and thus can’t do this stuff quickly. Sort of limited to text. Would love to see other classes anywhere take and enhance their work.
Talk soon 🙂