Working titles: Shakespeare’s Age and Stage OR The Shakespeare Chronicles OR Shakespeare Transformed
Topic: This digital storytelling project aims to help secondary students understand Shakespeare’s life and times through an interactive, multimodal choose-your-own-adventure digital narrative.
Platform/tool: Canva
Rationale:
This digital narrative is intended to support the EHS Stage 4 English unit Shakespeare’s Bawdy Mouth, where students explore Elizabethan England to gain an understanding of Shakespeare’s context and works. It could also be used as revision for Stage 5 or 6 English students studying a variety of Shakespearean plays.
In this choose-your-own-adventure narrative, students will follow the adventures of a young actor in Shakespeare’s theatre company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as they prepare for the opening night of Macbeth in 1606. Students will be presented with choices to guide the narrative and learn about Shakespeare’s life and times. It aims to utilise the three elements of quality digital literature I’ve previously identified – interactivity, multimodality, and connectivity – to support students’ developing understandings.
Ideally, this resource will also function as a research pathfinder, as student’s choices will be supplemented by hyperlinks to external resources in order to support literary learning and develop their information literacy skills. Currently, students are assessed on their knowledge of this unit via their composition of three diary entries from the perspective of someone in Shakespeare’s time. Students could potentially use this narrative as a model for their own digital diary entries, thus updating the task for a digital environment and supporting student learning needs in the 21st century.
I initially investigated PowerPoint and Microsoft Sway for this task but chose to use Canva for a variety of reasons. I enjoyed using Microsoft Sway but its inability to link between pages meant that it wasn’t viable for a hyperlinked choose-your-own-adventure narrative. I am proficient with PowerPoint and could utilise many of its features to construct a hyperlinked narrative, but felt that Canva was easier and more appealing for Stage 4 students due to its user-friendly interface, cloud storage, collaborative potential and its wide database of images and graphics. It is also free to access for NSW Department of Education students via their student portal. However, I am finding it difficult to inset audio to different slides since Canva is limited to one audio file per design.
You can view the work in progress here.
You had me at Shakespeare. This sounds fantastic and i’m having a ‘wish I’d though of that moment’. I love the idea that students could use this as an example. Canva is awesome but I can’t help you with the sound problem. I’ve never tried to do this either. Good luck it sounds like a great project.
Thanks for your feedback! Shakespeare is such a prominent aspect of the English syllabus, and I’ve found over my career that students really struggle to visualise the differences between his time and our own and therefore find it difficult to understand so much of his work. I’m hoping that the multimodality of digital storytelling can help fill that gap!
Hi Danielle, thanks so much for sharing your proposal and progress so far! I think this is a wonderful, fun concept and can imagine using this with my Year 9 students as we study Romeo and Juliet. I think this digital narrative would be particularly helpful as the students learn about context and imagine life in Shakesperean times!
The choose-your-own-adventure element supports interactivity as students have to consider options and make decisions along the way. I’m really excited to find out what will happen with the story, and the video so far is fantastic with illustrations, historic images, integrated videos and the Shakespeare emoji which links to additional learning content.
I think that your resource’s dual function as a pathfinder is very clever, so that students can access relevant links and find out more information.
Here are some other resources/links that might be helpful for you:
• The Royal Shakespeare Company has some useful education resources, such as this ‘Learning Zone’ page about Macbeth: https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeare-learning-zone/macbeth
• There are a number of embedded videos such as this one in which the Royal Shakespeare Company actors explain and demonstrate shared lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=17&v=jPa2rKXDQP0&feature=emb_title
• There are also several TED-Ed videos and resources related to Shakespeare: https://www.ted.com/search?q=shakespeare
I am also using Canva for my digital storytelling project, due to its usability and content database. I signed up to a free trial month of the ‘Premium’ membership, which has given me access to more audio options. You might want to join as well, so you can use multiple audio files in your project.
Keep up the great work – and I can’t wait to see the end result!
Emma 😊
Thanks for the feedback! Those links are great, and I’ll definitely try to incorporate them into my resource 🙂 I work for the NSW Department of Education so I think I already have access to the Premium Canva resources, but my difficulty stems from the fact that currently Canva only supports one audio file per presentation.
Hi Danielle, this sounds like a great storytelling project – I would’ve loved this Shakespearean choose your own adventure setting myself when I was in high school! With regards to Canva, I’ve also been looking into using this platform for the same reasons you’ve listed, and watched a Youtube clip about how to add multiple audio tracks to a presentation (new feature since end of last year). Haven’t tried it out myself yet, so can’t verify the ease of actually doing it. Good luck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8tjFvLeBlM
Alyssa
Thanks for your feedback! This video looks great! You may have saved my resource! Hopefully I’ll be able to download my digital narrative as a video file and still be able to keep the hyperlinks for the ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ aspect.
Hi Danielle, this is my edited post/feedback to support Assessment 4!
This sounds like a great storytelling project – I would’ve loved this Shakespearean choose your own adventure (CYOA) setting myself when I was in high school! Your project sounds as if it would be engaging for students, and supports research that suggests using digital games, such as the CYOA storytelling format, is an effective way to increase student engagement and learning (Gillespie, 2022, p.3). I also like your idea to use your narrative as a model for students own creative digital diaries, which also supports the Digital Literacy general capability (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2022). With regards to Canva, I’ve also been looking into using this platform for the same reasons you’ve listed (i.e. cloud storage and great database of multimedia resources). I watched a YouTube clip about how to add multiple audio tracks to a presentation (a new feature since end of last year), which may help with your dilemma. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8tjFvLeBlM
I haven’t tried it out myself yet, so I can’t verify the ease of actually doing it. Good luck!
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2022). Digital Literacy. Australian Curriculum. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/digital-literacy?element=0&sub-element=0
Gillespie, B. (2022). Using digital storytelling and game-based learning to increase student engagement and connect theory with practice. Teaching & Learning Inquiry 10,1-16. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.10.14.
Pasquier, N. (2022, January 5). Canva presentation with audio [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8tjFvLeBlM
AMENDED COMMENT WITH REFERENCES:
Hi Danielle, thanks so much for sharing your proposal and progress so far! I think this is a wonderful, fun concept and can imagine using this with my Year 9 students as we study Romeo and Juliet. I think this digital narrative would be particularly helpful as the students learn about context and imagine life in Shakesperean times!
The choose-your-own-adventure element supports interactivity as students have to consider options and make interactive choices along the way (Walsh, 2013). I’m really excited to find out what will happen with the story, and the video so far is fantastic with illustrations, historic images, integrated videos, and the Shakespeare emoji which links to additional learning content.
I think that your resource’s dual function as a pathfinder is very clever, so that students can access relevant links and find out more information.
Here are some other resources/links that might be helpful for you:
• Royal Shakespeare Company has some useful education resources, such as this ‘Shakespeare Learning Zone’ page about Macbeth
• There are several embedded videos such as this one in which the Royal Shakespeare Company actors explain and demonstrate shared lines
• There are also several TED-Ed videos and lesson resources related to Shakespeare, such as this fabulous animation of ‘All the World’s a Stage’ (Balais & Le Bars, 2019).
I am also using Canva for my digital storytelling project, due to its usability and content database. I signed up to a free trial month of the ‘Premium’ membership, which has given me access to more audio options. You might want to join as well, so you can use multiple audio files in your project.
Keep up the great work – and I can’t wait to see the end result!
Emma
Reference List:
Balais, J., & Le Bars, J. (2019, December 21). All the World’s a Stage – by William Shakespeare. [Video]. TED Ed. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/all-the-world-s-a-stage-by-william-shakespeare#watch
Canva. (2022). https://www.canva.com/
Royal Shakespeare Company. (2017, March 17). What are shared lines? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPa2rKXDQP0&t=17s
Royal Shakespeare Company. (2022). Macbeth. Shakespeare Learning Zone. https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeare-learning-zone/macbeth
Walsh, M. (2013). Literature in a digital environment. In L. McDonald (Ed.), A literature companion for teachers (pp. 181-194). Primary English Teaching Association Australia.