Shakespeare with a Twist: Using Thinglink in MS English

 Middle School students are preparing for their Romeo and Juliet monologues using an online caricature development site called Thinglink that allows students to create and share interactive images and videos. Peter Jennings reports "Essentially, I was looking for a way to help our students prep for their Romeo and Juliet monologues, which each student will perform for their class (some will perform for the entire middle school). The iPad apps helped them to take on the role of the character, to climb inside their character's head, and to do some research on previous performances.

Jennings continues, " Each student created a caricature of the character performing their monologue using the "Caricatura" app. This became the background for a "ThingLink," an interactive image with text and videos. Using the "ThingLink" app, students wrote a description, a letter, a journal entry, and "tweets" from their character to bolster their understanding of the character in general. To help them prepare the specific performance, they created a modern-day "translation" of their monologue, linked to a video of a professional performance of the scene, and created a video of themselves performing the monologue. All of this content is linked directly on the image of the character that they created. "