Using a Sway to teach a Sonnet
For the last two weeks my Year 11 English class has been working diligently on their close reading skills. The goal is that by the end of the year they are adept at reading and analysing an unfamiliar piece of poetry or prose for meaning in their external exam. I believe that this set of skills is at the core of English teaching because in “real life” we need to read books, read people, read bank statements, read instagram posts and read business reports. Close reading is essential for life 2.0.
So today I’m trying something different with my class. I’m using an Office 365 app called Sway to teach them a sonnet. Sway, as I explained to my students, is PowerPoint on steroids. It’s a Microsoft education app which accelerates the creation of a collaborative presentations. Simply, it’s a web app which accepts pictures, titles and text and instantly transforms them into beautiful one-page presentations. It’s different to PowerPoint because it’s not a file (pptx) it’s actually a website hosted on a unique URL. This means that it takes no space on your device; it can easily be shared, posted, emailed and tweeted. It’s also able to be edited by anyone with the ‘editor’s’ link. Sways can be made on your web browser and also on your mobile device through the iOs app.
The beauty of this app is in it’s simplicity. Gone are the days of spending precious hours editing font sizes and picture dimensions to a particular template or style. You just drop in your content and Sway makes it into a pretty picture. If you don’t like the look of the Sway then you just click the “design” button to transform the presentation into another style…
Back to Shakespeare…
My students don’t know much about Shakespeare or his sonnets. So I set them a quick task: make a Sway called “Sonnet 18” which includes five biographic details on the poet; five features of the sonnet form and five language features used to emphasise the meaning of the poem.
Boom.
They are away reading, researching and reviewing the beautiful “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day…”
I can’t wait to see the results and listen to their presentations.
