Yesterday I was chatting with Megan Palevich (@mrspal) on Twitter and learned about this fantastic Story of Learning. Megan took a common high school reading project and transformed it into an engaging, fun activity for her students. Rather than simply assigning and testing on chapters (the way I read To Kill a Mockingbird), Megan brought the characters to life by inviting students to create social networking profiles and updates from the view of the characters. Brilliant! The students genuinely enjoyed the opportunity to think differently about their reading, growing more intimate with the characters 140 characters at a time.
Here is what Megan had to say about the project:
“So how to you take a classic book and make it relevant to kids today? You include Facebook, Twitter, and IM into the project. My 8th graders ate this project up! If you want to see if your students truly have a grasp of character development, have them write tweets as that character.”
Here is an example from one of her students:
You can read Megan’s original post here.
Do you want to recreate this Learning Story in your classroom? Megan shares her original instructions for the project here.
Be sure to check out Megan’s blog, Middle School 101, for more excellent Stories of Learning happening in her classroom. She is a fabulous teacher!
I would love to hear your Stories of Learning, please contact me here to guest post or cross-post a Story of Learning.
Kelly,
) Megan
Thank you so much for taking the time to put such a nice post together about my project. I would be happy to share the original files with any teachers that are interested in using them with their classes. They can contact me on my blog or twitter handle @mrspal. The project is so versatile that you can use it with any novel or historical event! I can’t wait to show my students this post…I’m so proud of all of their hard work, innovation, and creativity shown during this project and every day!
How unbelievably cool! What a great way to get kids to connect with the text and the technology. Unreal!
What a fantastic idea! I’m just finishing up Les Miserables with my 8th graders and I think I’ll have them do this project when we return from Spring Break. I think they’ll love it. Thanks for sharing.