• Bill realizes his students are more tech savvy than he is.
• Neel realizes he’s not a teacher.
• Nonny realizes she may actually be a cat blogger after all.
• Students realize Shakespeare’s not so hoity toity.

While I’m sure there’s value in allowing students to use new technology (class blog) to revive a lost art (annotation), I can only see the downside: we as adults are enabling the self-absorbed little twits.

Yeah, this just in: Neel Mehta is not a teacher.

What if we had students annotate their text using hyperlinks and post their work to a class blog? Then other students could use the comments feature to provide feedback, and perhaps suggest additional annotations.

Today’s teachers are very enthusiastic about creative ideas like these. The art of teaching has seen a lot of innovation since we were in school. Our teachers, for the most part, cared about us and worked hard to educate us. But they didn’t have the advantage of the information we have today about how students learn best.

No doubt, when our students become teachers, they will judge us for not understanding how the Internet could be used to form global collaborative learning communities, or something like that.

Really, many of your assignments are quite refreshing. Here’s hoping, for the sake of students, a few teachers read this entry and borrow your ideas.

I also really like your assignment. Modern films that are based on the characters and stories of Shakespeare include 10 Things I Hate About You, O, She’s The Man, My Own Private Idaho, and Scotland, PA. In the advanced class, I offered them the assignment to create their own such adaption, but analyzing an existing one would be the logical counterpart for this list. Of course, this only works if you’re studying one of the plays being adapted (respectively The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Twelfth Night, both Henry IV plays, and Macbeth), but these are taught commonly enough.

Also, if you give Assignment 2 to high school kids, you really learn a lot about what’s going on in their world.

One thing you could add is to have the students watch a modern film that is based on the characters of Shakespeare. I don’t know of any, right off the top of my head, but I am thinking along the lines of Bridget Jones being a modern film that is based on the characters of Pride and Prejudice (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was based on Persuasion). Sometimes, the corresponding characters aren’t as easy to find. For example, the character of Wickham in P&P was actually split into two characters in Bridget Jones (Daniel Cleaver and Julian). If the characters are somewhat rearranged, you could ask why it was necessary to rearrange them (for example, Bridget didn’t have a sister so Cleaver couldn’t run off with her sister and it would have been kind of gross if he ran off with her mother), and whether the rearrangement added anything to the story.