This article answers a question I have had since 10th grade English - "Is it possible to make Jane Eyre interesting?"
I watched the Hamlet video and was thoroughly entertained. I could see these videos being used in 8th grade and high school English classes, especially if you edited one or two short segments (he says a** and b****, but other curse words are bleeped out within the video).
These clips could be really useful when discussing the topic of "audience." As a culmination to a unit/lesson on audience, I could see students making their own version of "Thug Notes" or "rewriting" a book to some extent and adapt the work for a specific culture/group of people.
Hah. Awesome.
Here are a few more specifically for middle school literature:
1. Divide the number of pages in your novel by the number of chapters it contains. The average should be equal to or less than your intended audience's age.
2. Determine the ratio of action verbs to any other verbs. If the ratio is less than 5:1, include more crazy twists and scenarios to keep the attention of your reader.
And most importantly...
3. The number of characters in your novel that are either vampires, werewolves, or zombies should exceed that of all humanoid characters. If not, revamp your story to comply with current fad.
This is a pretty cool app that my PE teachers want to buy. It allows the user to be John Madden and analyze their athletes improvements. It even allows editing and voice overs.
"Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data-remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century."
Large Database of Interactive historical maps
Interesting article that I'm going to share with my English teachers. If they are interested, I'm going to look for/recommend similar functioning tools that they could use with their students.
"Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they've observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they've written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is "corrective, even punitive" do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer."