Shakespeare Uncovered: Education Resources

Recently, you might have seen  Shakespeare Uncovered take on Hamlet and The Tempest.  This  great series combines history, biography, iconic performances, new analysis, and the personal passions of celebrated hosts such as Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons and Joely Richardson to tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.

We invite you to see Shakespeare Uncovered as a series of splendid “short courses” made easy with episodes available for streaming.  Designed for immediate use in high school classrooms, an educator site provides a robust collection of lesson plans and curricular materials — which adhere to national learning standards – and contain video segments, comprehensive instructions for classroom implementation, printable student handouts, links to online resources, and suggestions for extension activities to enhance students’ reading, viewing, and appreciation of Shakespeare’s works.

Just a few of the lessons for grades 9-12 are Talking to Myself:  Hamlet’s Soliloquies,  All the Globe’s a Stage:  Shakespeare’s Theatre and Women’s Roles in As You Like It.   PBS LearningMedia, a digital library for teachers, also has scores of classroom resources on Shakespeare for grades 6-13+.

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Common Sense Media’s Digital Passport

From eSchool News, 12/21/12, Common Sense Media has released Digital Passport, a free, web-based tool to help educators prepare students from grades 3 to 5 to use online and mobile technologies. Based on lessons from Common Sense Media’s K-12 Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum, the tool addresses issues kids face online — safety and security, cyber bullying, privacy, responsible cell phone use, and respecting creative work — and leverages a blended-learning model of classroom instruction with online videos and games extensively tested in implementation sites in seven regions across the country. Additionally, Digital Passport’s modules align to the ISTE NETS standards and Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Public schools in Chicago, Denver, New York City, and Omaha, as well as schools in Maine and California, have committed to using Digital Passport this academic year.
Read more about this new resource in eSchool News’ report.

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Adolescent Literacy: Self-Paced Student Lessons

The Teachers’ Domain self-paced student lessons for adolescent literacy, funded by the Walmart Middle School Literacy Initiative, make their debut at this year’s National Council for Teachers of English conference in Chicago. These self-paced lessons align with the Common Core standards that emphasize teaching literacy skills through content and are designed to enhance the literacy skills of struggling 5^th – 8^th grade readers.

Each lesson contains 10 – 12 screens in which students read, view videos, complete an interactive activity, and write to learn about an engaging science or history topic.  Resources can be searched by content area or key literary strategies such as determining important information, sequencing events, and understanding problem/solution.

In the self-paced literacy lesson Solving a Public Health Problem, for example, students watch videos about a real-life disease outbreak in New York City and learn about the step-by-step process public health workers use in investigating the cause of similar outbreaks.  Exploring a science focus on public health, they read informational text, learn and practice vocabulary words, and explore content through videos and interactive activities. When finished, students select and complete a writing assignment offline.

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From eSchool News: Common Core Report

From eSchool News, September 12, 2011 – “A new report from the Center on Education Policy finds that common core state standards in math and English language arts are moving closer to implementation at the district level in states that have adopted them. The study details districts’ views about the impact of the standards, and their progress and challenges in implementation. Fifty-seven percent or more of the districts in states that have adopted the common core standards agree the new standards in math and English language arts are more rigorous than those they are replacing. Moreover, district officials see relatively little resistance to the standards from parents, community members, and local educators, with only 10 percent of districts considering resistance from teachers and principals to be a major challenge, and just 5 percent experiencing resistance from parents and community members. The results are based on a nationally representative survey of school districts conducted in the winter and spring of 2011. All responses came from districts in the 44 states that had adopted the standards at the time of analysis. To date, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the common core standards, which were released in June 2010 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.”  See the report here: http://www.cep-dc.org/

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