William Shakespeare coined the phrase “brave new world,” which is often used to describe the astonishing possibilities and potential problems of technological advancements.
But he probably never envisioned teachers would make his plays come to life with the help of artificial intelligence.
Pam Amendola, an English teacher at Dawson County High School in Dawsonville, Ga., decided to put an AI twist into her lessons on “Macbeth,” one of the bard’s best-known tragedies and a play she’s taught for about a decade.
Her goal: provide an engaging hook for students who might not get an English literature nerd thrill out of the play’s signature “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy.
“When you say Shakespeare, they shut down,” Amendola said.
So Amendola had her students—12th graders just weeks away from graduation and fully feeling low-motivation senioritis—animate scenes from the Scottish play’s fourth act, using AI tools. (Last year, Amendola used pika.AI and ElevenLab.ai for the project. This year, she switched to Veo 3 ai, a Google AI video platform.)
Students acted as animators, actors, and directors. They read in the dialog themselves, but could give their character a different voice.
That meant the students needed an understanding of Shakespeare’s signature Elizabethan-era, poetic dialogue, which Amendola had already built by having students act out the scenes in class and discussing the work in literature circles.
Having students apply their knowledge of Shakespeare to develop AI-animated videos may sound like just a fun project. But if designed properly, it can actually be a way to engage students’ critical thinking skills, said Torrey Trust, a professor of learning technology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“You’re putting creative thinking in the hands of students,” said Trust, responding to a reporter’s description of Amendola’s project. “And that is very higher order thinking.”
Pairing lessons on a centuries-old play with AI literacy
In the centuries since they were written, Shakespeare’s plays have been staged in settings that wouldn’t have been familiar to their original audiences in Elizabethan London—think “Romeo and Juliet” in the Old American West or “The Tempest” in modern-day New Orleans.
Some of Amendola’s students went even more outside the box than that, animating “Macbeth” with characters from favorite video games or TV shows, including Fortnite and Fallout.
The activity gave Amendola a chance to pair lessons on a classic text with instruction on AI literacy.
So, along with parsing Macbeth’s descent from war hero to full-on monster, the students explored questions like “How do we use an algorithm? How does natural language processing work?” Amendola said.
Amendola knows that many of her fellow English teachers are wary of AI’s ability to produce an essay on just about any topic seemingly from nowhere. They worry that if students rely on AI too much for writing, they will miss out on the “productive struggle” that comes from bringing their own voice and analysis to a piece of writing.
For Amendola, that makes assignments like the animated AI videos all the more vital.
“Just because they weren’t writing an essay didn’t mean that they weren’t learning and developing critical-thinking skills,” Amendola said in a video created as part of her work as an Apple distinguished educator, explaining the assignment. Students had to “show me they understood what was happening in each scene because they had to prompt [the AI tool] to get the desired result.”
Her students sweated through creating the AI videos the same way they would have once grappled with writing a strong concluding paragraph.
“Making sense of the archaic language was difficult enough, but transferring their new knowledge to a tangible product was evidence of the reproducible skill that they can use after graduation,” she said in the video.
