myShakespeare

myShakespeare is an interactive website where students can read, listen, watch videos, and annotate six popular Shakespeare Plays. Included on the site are Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Julius Caesar. Users can read, browse, and search the full text of each play by acts, scenes, or in its entirety. Each work comes with supporting resources linked through sidebar icons, including vocabulary hints, scene summaries, audio narration (with real voices), and explanations of context and literary allusions. Also included are live and animated videos featuring in-character interviews, discussions of the text, performances, and more; depending on the play, there might be a handful of videos or dozens for students to view. 

If students create accounts, they'll also have access to the Notebook feature, which allows them to annotate the text as they read. Students can add tags and highlight in different colors, features that are useful for gathering evidence and making the connections they'll need for eventual essay writing. Notebooks are sharable as PDFs, so students can share their notes with peers or submit annotations to their teachers for review and, if applicable, grading. The site also contains teacher resources that give ideas for remote learning, teaching tips, and additional information about how to engage their students while making learning Shakespeare both manageable and enjoyable.

The interactive nature of the site -- and the elegant design -- will almost certainly get every student digging more deeply into Shakespeare.  Students can read, listen, watch, and write, often within the same passage. There's a nice focus on makings things more clear while also encouraging students to read closely and interpret the texts. Some videos are a bit dry or corny, but many are insightful and bring the monologues and dialogues to life. It's worth nothing that there's also a focus on diverse representations, and actors of a variety of ethnicities, genders, and ages play the characters. However, some plays are better than others. 

Built-in hints cover literary allusions, historical references, and the context of conversations among characters, providing necessary scaffolding for students who feel intimidated by the complexities of the language and details of each work. Glossed Words provide readers with short definitions that they can refer to alongside the original words, many of which Shakespeare invented. This is a great time saver and frustration reducer as students don’t lose valuable time struggling through language and syntax. Of course, if they prefer a more pure experience, students can toggle this feature off and ignore the hints on either side. Finally, the Notebook is an excellent way for readers to keep track of their understanding, track passages for future writing, and communicate progress to their teachers. This is great feature but could be even better. Since there's no teacher dashboard, there's no two-way communication within the notebooks, and students must export their work and send to teachers. This isn't wonderfully formatted, but it's good enough. And classrooms could use a workaround such as Kami to export the notebooks and then use them as a space for collaboration and assessment.