Any creative ways to make the Great Gatsby more enticing to students?

I am looking for some creative teaching strategies to help students take a bite out of the novel, rather than spit it out! Any ideas??

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Permalink Reply by Chuck on May 7, 2009 at 9:56am

Dee,
While I have not done this personally, I have seen/heard of examples of teachers using Ning to help students dialogue or interact as the characters.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on May 7, 2009 at 1:02pm

I blogged about this a while back to centralize some neat stuff I'd seen. Blogs or social networks as characters may work for you.

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Permalink Reply by Chuck on May 8, 2009 at 9:36am

Following this thread, rather than creating bogus accoutns at sites, you could use Today's Meet (http://todaysmeet.com/). This site creates a closed Twitter-like chat session in which students post in 140 characters or less each time they speak. You can copy and paste atranscript into WOrd, Googel DOcs, etc if you wish to preserve the conversation.

In practice, you could assign each student a character or a viewpoint or an opinion position, etc. Then, have them login to a session, use their position as their moniker, and have at it.

This would work for any number of lit pieces, or social studies, etc

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Permalink Reply by Raman Job on May 8, 2009 at 9:33am

You might try an novel "Common Craft, Plain English" approach suggested by Andrew Marcinek, also a Classroom 2.0 member. Check out his recent post on www.beyond3rs.ning.com. Cheers!

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Permalink Reply by dee on May 8, 2009 at 10:06am

Just perused Andrew's site...WOW! Most of the technology discussion in our PD centered around much of the tools listed on his site. Will definitely look into making a novel movie trailer and using Toon Doo for chapter reivew/character sketch kinds of activities.