Implementation of ‘Shakespeare with Europeana’ (SOI-HR-219)

The learning scenario that I wanted to apply in my teaching environment was ‘Shakespeare with Europeana’ created by Kristina Jelošek. The decision to implement again the similar topic was made when I saw that students enjoyed working on Europeana site previously and I wanted to see how another Shakespeare scenario would work with other classes. I have chosen second graders (15,16-year old students) and used this scenario as a part of my English curriculum – it fits well since the topic is appropriate, but I made certain changes in the content because of the age since my students are two years older than the ones this scenario was intended for.

Time frame and activities

The amount of time planned by the author suited me perfectly because I usually have double English lessons (around 90 minutes) and the activities were well distributed.That just meant that I had to shorten the last phase of presenting their posters but it turned out to be enough time and I used an online evaluation sheet  so it was quicker to collect students’ feedback.

I used all the activities from the LS and in that specific order, the adjustment I made was to make the last two activities shorter (poster creation and presentation) – each for 5 minutes to fit the double class of 90 minutes. They had an opportunity to create poster sin any media they wanted – even real paper ones.

Materials

I used the worksheets that the author put in her LS – so putting story in order and feedback rubrics.I made  changes in the first worksheet in the content because this seemed a little bit too easy for my students to do and I made the evaluation rubrics digital (Google forms) because of the pandemic context in which I work – online and I wanted this phase of the work to be faster.

My students worked on Europeana site before so they did not need too much instructions.I told  them how to attribute the authors/sites for their work in a proper way and that is why they could have used other sources of online information.

Type of work

Since I had this class online via Zoom, I created breakout rooms consisting of 4 students and I told them to work as a team.That is why I assigned roles to each team member – creative designer, presenter, writer, researcher. So, in the creative phase – poster preparation- they followed this kind of work organization. I managed to overlook the work but it was slower than in class work because it takes time to log in each group individually. My plan was to give them to rewrite the balcony scene in a humorous way and to practice and perform it in class but we were out of time. I will definitely try it out when the time is better.

This LS is well organized as far as activities are concerned, the materials and lesson plan provided (time frame with description of activities, worksheet and rubrics) give enough to perform this lesson without extra work, though they also allow you to use them as a base on which to build upon your own lesson (in my case to adjust to the age of my students and online environment).

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?

Shakespeare with Europeana created by Kristina Jelošek.

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Public Domain Mark 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Örebro läns museum.