Badging Shakespeare
We are working with Shakespeare this year. It has been very exciting, stressful and at times very frustrating but we are almost there….
The project started, as they often do, when someone from the DMLL spoke with someone at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) about something completely different and the end result was a joint project to develop a series of Digital Badges for primary school children around the activities that they develop for Shakespeare Week. The badges will replace the paper Passport to Shakespeare that they sent in previous years to schools across the country — over 40,000 were sent out last year !
Through our existing connection with DigitalMe, we identified that Makewaves would be an appropriate platform for the digital badges — it is designed for use by primary schools, children under 13 and home schoolers. This gave us access to the Makewaves community who are already familiar with digital badges, and would introduce the Shakespeare week community to further opportunities engaging with digital badge projects.
The project began with some initial meetings and chats, which included a tour of the Shakespeare Birthplace house and museum for those in our team who had not visited it. We spent a very productive day in late June 2016 with the education team in the SBT developing 9 badges — 3 for each key stage. These were designed on the Makewaves canvas and became the starting point for the project design.
Over the next six months work progressed at varying speeds. The team in the DMLL designed the layout of the pages on Makewaves and identified the links, stories, blogs and resources required for each badge. The SBT education team worked hard to produce resources, some from their own work and some in collaboration with their partners — Walker Books and Musicline. It was not always smooth sailing. There were delays in getting images and permissions; there was work developed specially for the project that couldn’t be rushed and there were design issues and complications.
On top of that, Makewaves were in the process of updating and changing their site so it was decided that there was no point in uploading any content until the new site went live — which happened this week !
Fortunately, we have a great team here in the DMLL. Lauren and Charlie have organised resources, built mock ups and carefully logged and tagged all the content for the site. They started building the live site this week and we are hoping to have it finished early next week.
The next step is some usability testing to make sure that the signposting is clear and that teachers, parents and kids can navigate easily. Design changes will follow and we are hoping to go live at the beginning of March.
If you have kids, this is a great way to introduce them to Shakespeare. If you are a teacher, here are a load of brilliant and timeless resources to support Shakespeare in the classroom. If you are a fan — here’s a fun look at Shakespeare.
Shakespeare week runs from 20–26 March 2017 and we are hoping that thousands of school kids will get involved with their teachers and schools and learn all about digital badges at the same time.
Project team:
Lauren Heywood, Charles Legge, Sarah Merry, Koula Charitonos
