“All the world’s a stage”: making Shakespeare relevant in the digital age

The Royal Shakespeare Company and Ravensbourne College have teamed up to provide a unique outreach programme that ‘live streams’ to schools worldwide, a mix of stage action and interactive dialogue with the actors and production team.

In this session CEO of Ravensbourne, Professor Linda Drew and Jacqui O’Hanlon, RSC Director of Education lead a panel on the huge potential of educational technology collaborations with the cultural sector, highlighting their new work with the RSC.

The broadcasts which are led by students at Ravesbourne’s state of the art broadcast studios, start with a live introduction from the studio and include activities for school children to help them engage with the production and get the most from the experience. The play itself is broken up into three parts, rather than the usual two, with further student activities between each section and live Q&As with actors from the company. Throughout the broadcast schools can use Twitter or the special message function on the broadcast site to suggest questions for the actors.

Image: ‘RSC King Lear Broadcast Students’ courtesy of Ravensbourne