Monday, March 26, 2012

Twitter Hamlet.

The Toronto Sun reports English teacher Danika Barker is using Twitter to teach Shakespeare to her students at Central Elgin Collegiate Institute in St. Thomas:
You can make the role as big as you wanted." Barker said. "It wasn't . . . tweeting for the sake of tweeting. It was more like a strategy to get them to focus on what was really happening in the play and to become really invested in what was happening."

"Using Twitter kept every student involved in the play regardless of the size of their character's role.

"For example, students taking on a character who meets an early demise -- and there's plenty of them in Hamlet -- continued to tweet from the grave.

"Hamlet! My son! do not engage in this fight! you're falling into Claudius's trap if you fight laertes!" Hamlet's dead father tweeted before the prince was killed in a duel."
Worth visiting for the accompanying photo of Barker clutching an edition of The Shakespeare Encyclopaedia (reviewed by me here) which thanks to its weight can't have been an easy volume to hold at that angle.

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