Macbeth – Technology Pursuit

Tag: Macbeth

Classroom Chats with Today’s Meet

In my last post, I talked about using The Question Game as an uber-effective way to teach question forming.

Now what did we do with those questions?

I looked at the “favorited” questions that were circled by the students and selected the top ones to be on our online chat agenda. Then I wrote up a question agenda for our online chat.

After a quick online chat tutorial (I knew a few students did not know how Twitter/online chats worked) and a warmup question, the students took off.

Below is a bit of the transcript. I was really impressed with this class’s theory that perhaps Lady Macbeth’s insanity is due to her “missing” child. In the play, she states that she’s nursed a babe, yet there is no other evidence of the child or that it is still alive. They theorized that the loss of this child has perhaps pushed Lady Macbeth’s emotional instability and her desire for power to fill the void in her life. Deep thinking from 17-year-olds!

What I need to do next time is a third day for a short reflection period. I didn’t have students go back and evaluate their questions post-chat, discuss which questions worked and which didn’t, and analyze reasons why.

Studying Word Choice & Mood with Macbeth

March 4, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 0 Comments

For my multimedia class, I had to create a video with captions, images, and music, so I set up a tentative project for my students to choose a soliloquy/monologue from Macbeth and do a similar video, probably in Animoto.

But once I’d made my video on the dagger scene (see above), I realized I suddenly had a quick prop for our final dagger scene wrap up day.

Using the sample video, students wrote down on post it notes the words with strongest connotations. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with:

murder, fatal, dead, ravishing, dagger, bloody, knell, wicked

We talked about what kind of mood Shakespeare is establishing with those words–and how this can be related to other forms of reading and writing.

When students are asked about mood, whether on a test, in a college lit class, or simply while pleasure reading, one of the greatest hints to mood is the author’s use of word choice.

We also discussed how the same goes with writing. As writers, we need to choose words with strong connotations to help express our style and tone.

It was a quick 8-10 minute lesson, but an effective one–full engagement from every student on a concept they could see visually both in language and images, hear in the music, see the patterns in our list on the board, and–hopefully–apply in their reading and writing lives.

Linking to Images in Curriculet

February 19, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 0 Comments

Curriculet is such a great resource that I’ve found to use while teaching Macbeth. Shakespeare uses so many metaphors and allusions that students don’t understand–such as the martlet on the far top and Lady Macbeth’s reference to the “sticking point” in the lower top.

With Curriculet, I can embed those images directly into the text, so students can see and understand the reference visually. Extremely handy!

Curriculet has become my go-to app for assigned reading. Instead of spending classtime reading the text with the students, explaining it, and helping them with the basic understanding, they can read it on their own here, follow my annotations, answer my reading check questions, and gain that basic level of understanding. Then I can spend class time with deeper, richer activities, such as the Institute of Play’s Socratic Smackdown that we did earlier this week.

I also love the fact that students move at their own pace. The ones who have questions I can work with one-on-one. I also link the PBS Macbeth film to the Curriculet, so students can view the film while reading the text. I love how students can see the play come alive with professional actors; seeing the film version simultaneously with the text also scaffolds their understanding.

Teach Macbeth Through Curriculet

February 11, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 0 Comments

In between parent-teacher conferences today, I made a new Curriculet for Act 1, Scenes 3 & 4 of Macbeth. If you’re planning to teach Macbeth in the imminent future, you can check it out here.

The great thing about Curriculet is I can embed video links that allow students to view the scene before they read it. Or, if they resize windows, they can watch it side by side with the text. This allows for 1) students to pick up on body language and non-verbal cues and better understand the text, and 2) consider the lines that aren’t included or are rearranged in the film and why the director made these choices.

Below, you can see the side-by-side windows that I encourage my students to use when they’re “reading” Macbeth. This method is a great way to “flip” our classroom, especially when I have several student-athletes who plan to be gone.

Next week, we tackle Lady Macbeth’s opening soliloquy in Scene 5–then I’ll be testing out the Socratic Smackdown. I’ll keep you posted with how it goes.

Mingling with Macbeth: Getting Students Used to the Language

February 11, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 0 Comments

Students often struggle getting used to Shakespeare’s language. (No, it’s not a foreign language; no, we’re not going to read a translated version like Chaucer’s.) As an introductory activity to acclimate them to the language and realize that it’s not as hard as it first looks, we did a “Mingling with Macbeth” today.

Each student drew a quotation from the next three scenes (here are the ones I used), and then typed it into the first box of the Mingling with Macbeth form. Then students interviewed two classmates about what they thought the quotation meant and wrote the results in the next two boxes. Last, each student then wrote their final interpretation into the last box.

The activity forces students to examine the language of Shakespeare but encourages them to work with each other, think about what their classmates suggest, and make a final decision about their own interpretation. Most of the students showed excellent understanding of the quotations afterward, plus it provided students some predictions of what was to come and a bit of a teaser for them to look forward to tomorrow.

Anticipation Guides on Pear Deck

February 7, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 0 Comments

Anticipation guides at the beginning of a unit are now a staple in the teacher’s tool kit. However, I “techified” my Macbeth anticipation guide with the help of Pear Deck.

To be honest, I started with paper. I used Jim Burke’s Macbeth anticipation guide as a starting point for my own. I made copies and students circled their answers. Then they broke into discussion groups of 4-5 classmates, where they had to come to a consensus for each question.

Afterward, each group logged onto Pear Deck, and a member from each group, using the “draggable” tool, dragged the red line to their group’s response. I then called on random groups to explain and defend their responses.

This activity could easily be done individually, too, rather than in groups, especially if you have classes who are very open and enjoy discussing. For classes that are more reticent, however, the groups work well as a springboard into the overall class discussion. I hear stronger comments in the small groups, and I also find more members of small groups are willing to share with the whole class because they’ve already “rehearsed” their responses in small groups.

Pear Deck provides a great visual aid for anticipation guides and emphasizes how beliefs can range throughout a class.

Making Visual Aids with Pic Monkey

February 6, 2015 / Melissa Pilakowski / 1 Comment

It’s been a crazy busy week. Lots and lots and lots of essays to read and give feedback and speeches to coach and gamification quests to approve, and the snow keeps skirting around us and refuses to bless me with a snow day, even though Mother Nature has been generous with giving lots of other schools with plenty of days off.

Anyway. I made a thing last night. To be specific, a collage in PicMonkey. And to be honest, it looks pretty cool.

Our assignment this week in my multimedia class was to create a photo collage that was connected to our content area. Since my Brit Lit class started Macbeth today, I thought, “Is there a way I can integrate this into the Macbeth intro?”

So tomorrow, I will. Today we discussed the anticipation guide in groups, and tomorrow they’ll make predictions about the play based on the collage (which is in chronological order with the story.)

PicMonkey was so easy to use–my students could use the web program for their own projects. In lieu of the typical essay or report about a book, they could create a photographic storyboard. To display poetry they’ve written or poems they’ve loved, they can create photo collages using photos that evoke the mood, tone, and symbols in the writing. Students can create a biography about an historical event using a collage. The more I use it, the more I’ll come up with more ideas.

Technology Pursuit

Blending Technology Into the Language Arts Classroom