An A-Z of Poems, Poets and Lovely Lines

My website is designed to be a poetry-based website to be used by teachers and their students, and also to support the course I am creating for our Teaching and Learning module, which aims to explore with trainee teachers the ways in which the reading and writing of poetry can support literacy development. Therefore, any content needs to be accessible and usable in the classroom. The digital artefact I have created is a slider featuring an A to Z of poetry, but the journey to this was quite protracted. I began creating a timeline but wasn’t very engaged by the historical content. I then decided to see whether I could manipulate the timeline software to create an A to Z using that. I had some success but essentially it looked like an A to Z on a timeline – not ideal. Having no idea that a slider or carousel were so called, I then spent quite a while googling and eventually came across WordPress plugin that would do what I wanted, working in much the same way as the knight lab timeline software. The plugin works by allowing the uploading of an image and then a supplementary link to media. Unfortunately for now the slider works using images and linked videos only as creating an embedded video slider comes at considerable extra cost, which I will consider if I maintain the site after the course.  Having found the appropriate tool, the content became an issue. I had begun with an A to Z featuring devices such as alliteration but found this to be predictable, not very engaging, and existing on many sites already. So, I decided to personalise the slider to reflect my own interests.  The A to Z as you can see above, now consists of a series of images each representing quotes, poems, and poets that I have been drawn to particularly in my years as a teacher, with the description in each one being a link to a supplementary video – reading, interview, film or song based on the poem. Where possible images used are public domain images and free to use and share in any way without attribution, and where attribution was required, this is included on the image itself.