Web 2.0 Tools

There are so many cool web 2.0 tools out there. It was hard to pick just one that I wanted to take a better look at, but in the end, I worried that the tool became more important than the lesson - or that it lacked the sufficient rigor needed for high school classes. Early on, when our class looked at web 2.0, we covered the big names, Twitter, YouTube, etc. It was then that I thought of a lesson using YouTube. I liked that the tool itself is only the vehicle and that its use is something that is hip and cool for today's students. My lesson focuses on using a text, more specifically one that is meant to be presented dramatically - a play or poem - Shakespeare immediately comes to mind. As a student, I found it difficult to get into just reading Shakespeare's works. It simply wasn't enough to get a strong hold of the material. My idea is to have students, alone or in groups, work to bring to life a scene, character or a plot summary of a Shakespearean work in video and post it to YouTube. I even tried it out myself and enlisted the help of my children and a few of their friends to create a very brief overview of Romeo and Juliet.

Originally I thought that I could use a lesson like this with the reading comprehension strategies GLI but as I went through the exercise myself, I found that issues of comprehension were in the background and I was more concerned with characterization and presentation. There was another GLI regarding those goals that made better sense, and this lesson gives the coverage of this material more life than simply reading it.

For those of you who think, "I'll never get permission to use YouTube with my students," there is a viable alternative - TeacherTube. It may be less popular and lesser known that YouTube, but it is very similar web 2.0 tool dedicated strictly to videos that have some kind of academic pursuit and it would easily calm the worst YouTube critics.

Here's a link to the video I made for this project. Enjoy!

Romeo & Juliet - Slightly Abridged