Sunday, April 06, 2008

Shakespeare on Facebook?

Peoples, think with me, please.

7th graders just started to read Romeo & Juliet. Not gonna plow through the whole original text...I've gotta abridge some of it or their brains will asplode.

Skimming through the feedreader last night, found this sentence on LeaderTalk:

The good teacher is encouraging students to create mashups, to build social networking pages devoted to Romeo, to create discussion groups to second guess Juliet, and to figure out why Shakespeare separated lovers in two feuding houses in the first place.

How can I get Web2.0 on Billy Shakespeare? Could I have the students make profiles on Facebook / MySpace? Do we jump into Second Life on this one?

Juliet Capulet, hometown Verona, age 13.
Mercutio, interested in dreams and swordfights.


Or, do I take the profile pages from those sites, pull out the internet cord, and do them the old-fashioned way - pencil on paper?

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Right now my brain is stuck on these three questions:

1. Could this work?
2. How on earth would I assess this?
3. I'm not the first person to think of this - where is it on the web?

(in answer to number 2, seems to me that this needs to be done as we read the play - formative not summative assessment. and number 3 - i guess i just need to be a bit more persistent with my hunting.)