Shakespearean sonnets as digital stories

I’m trying to incorporate media literacy  (the ability to deconstruct and create meaningful messages using a variety of media tools)  and to mainstream education. My current position allows me to work directly with teachers and students during the school day. This creates the potential to propose media projects to support the work that teachers are already doing. I believe it is important to have the educators bring the challenge to the media consultant. The teacher already has the curriculum, goals and standards they have to work within. We can try to support this work while teaching media literacy and media production.

This first example has to do with language teacher approaching me with the challenge of contextualizing Shakespearean sonnets. She wanted to do in media project and wanted to have the students responsible for choosing the materials that would be in the media productions. I suggested creating digital stories with music and images that the students could create and download. Each specific line of the Shakespearean sonnet they were working on would be represented by one or two images.

First, pairs of students typed each sonnet in Word and thought about what each line next to them. they rewrote each line in language that was meaningful to them. They then found two images using creative Commons search feature to correspond with each line. all of the images were imported into an iMovie project and placed in the proper order. Next, each line was copied from the Word document and paste it into the iMovie project so that it would be displayed over the two corresponding images. finally music was chosen to match the overall mood of the sonnet. Many students found it difficult to use creative Commons to find music or did not have the time to create their own music using GarageBand so we allow students to use copyright music. This means that the work could not be shown on our local public access channel or could not be put on the school website.