Romeo and Juliet's Instagram Feed - Making ELA Fun and Authentic to Your Students

Language holds such a crucial part of our lives and we often take the ability to use our words for granted. For me, English is my first language and wasn't my favourite subject in school. I don't associate my lack of love for learning English with a certain teacher or activity but rather that the English language is complex and I didn't find it to be much fun the way I learned it. Due to my experience, I committed to making English fun when I taught it to my class but I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to accomplish that, particularly in studying older English such as Shakespeare. That is until I listened to our guest speaker, 

Tyler Letkeman, who framed his English Language Arts (ELA) program he teaches in a way that excited me.  

This blog post is going to highlight how Tyler Letkeman makes learning English fun, where technology fits into Tyler's classroom and my thoughts, spread throughout the blog post, on how I envision my ELA program to look. 

How to make learning English fun

Building connections between curriculum content to the students' real world is non-negotiable

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

 no matter the subject or grade. Building the connections not only engages students but also ensures that the content and skills learned are useful for the student's life outside the school system. Tyler has taken building connections within his ELA classes to a whole new level by making assignments fun. 

One way that Tyler shared how he builds connections between curriculum content and his students' lives is through how he teaches Shakespear. Shakespear is already a complex subject to grasp due to the old English and hidden messages. To try to make Shakespear fun and easier to approach for his students, he uses two mediums the students are already familiar with: Instagram and memes. 

While Tyler guides the students through Romeo and Juliet, the students work out the play by creating an Instagram newsfeed for one of the main characters. The posts need to have a written component and Tyler works with his students to build guidelines to what a good Instagram-post write-up looks like. Another Shapespear piece that is examined in Tyler's class is the play called, A Midsummer Night's Dream. During the unpacking of the play, students have to create memes for each scene to display how the characters are processing the events.

By building in two mediums that students are already familiar with and most likely have already worked with, the learning is focused on the unpacking of complex pieces of writing and other ELA skills, such as building pieces of text that are clear and concise for a targeted audience. Students are also very engaged in the activity as it doesn't present as "work" to them. 

I love the idea of using mediums that students are already using. The skills we teach them through those mediums can be directly applied to what they are doing in their lives outside of school. Not only can students practice their new skills in their personal Instagrams (depending on grade level) which further builds their new skills but the skills are also transferable to so many aspects of the student's life outside of school. For example, just think about how many times in your adult life you were asked to make your writing "clear and concise." It is a lot, isn't it? Even as I type right now, I am trying to get my point across in fewer words and I am struggling. It is a skill I will forever work to improve and so will our students. 

Where does technology fit in?

Technology tools bleed through both of the Shakespeare activities discussed above. Whether a real social media platform is used or a template of that social media platform, there are many ITC skills needed and used to complete those projects. The tech Tyler uses in his classroom doesn't just stop there. One way Tyler uses ICT tools in his classroom is to support leveraging authentic audiences. 

Making ELA fun is half the battle; what good is a piece of writing if it was written for a single person audience, me the teacher? In my post-secondary writing experiences, I knew what my professor preferred and always wrote to please them, simply because they are the ones that give out my grade. But is that really a good practice? I don't want my students writing to my preferences because that is not going to help them in the future. The writing my students do needs to be meaningful to them, beyond their grades. One way to accomplish is this, by having students write for authentic audiences. 

I know you are thinking "Didn't Mrs. Z have the word "technology" in the heading on this section?" I did and I will get to it, please stick with me!

In the video below students present an oral history project on the Civil Rights Movement to community members. Not only is the students' writing being presented to an authentic audience, but the audience was also a part of the project. The students interviewed members of the community that were apart of/contributed to, the Civil Rights Movement and presented an act of courage of that particular individual at the community gathering. The interviews of the community members alone is a great activity to have students engage in a authentic and transferable activity. As well, the activity connects the school with the community (a topic that can take up a blog post of its own). The students had an opportunity to write for someone other than their teacher and by the look of those students' faces in the video, they took pride and found meaningfulness in their writing for this assignment. Due to that pride and meaningfulness, it is reasonable to assume the students worked harder on this assignment than they might have for just something I, as their teacher, would see.   

NOW, let's talk technology. Being able to present in-person to connect with an authentic audience is not always the best format for all students or even possible right now, due to the pandemic. Technology today, allows us to reach a larger audience without having to physically gather.  To exploit the wonderful strategy of providing an opportunity for authentic audiences in the classroom, Tyler uses ICT tools such as public Google forms and various social media platforms. Within these tools, Tyler can leverage his Twitter reach and connect his students with a large audience and even create a dialogue between his students and the larger audience (anonymously for student privacy). The possibilities for authentic audiences are endless due to technology and by helping our students write for more people than just us, the teachers, we are setting them up with skills that will help them through their life. 

The use of Instagram and memes is just a small example of how to make English Language Arts fun for your students. In my classroom, ELA will be fun and my students will have many opportunities to write for authentic audiences. I challenge you to make your ELA or any other language class, fun and authentic! Got any ideas of how to do that? I love to hear them in the comments below!