Social Media Assessments

I’ve always been somewhat anti-twitter, but after today I am definitely considering getting an account simply because of the wealth of information that can be found there. I really like the perspective of a hashtag being equivalent to a community and a way to organize information so that it is easily accessible – I would love to incorporate this into my future classroom as well, especially as a high school teacher. I’ve seen many teachers that create a class/teacher twitter account (similar to the Instagram one we saw today) and kids really like it because we are reaching them in their world and their language – it seems like they really appreciate the effort and respect. I think one way I could do this is by asking my kids to respond to the book we are reading as if they were writing about it on various social media platforms. I would ask for a Facebook post, Instagram post, Tweet, and Snapchat about the chapter they read (or page range, or whatever amount makes sense for the book). Each of these posts would have different requirements. In the Tweet I would ask them to sum up the main idea of the chapter in one sentence (less than 140 characters) and include some type of clever hashtag. In the Instagram post, I would ask them to provide their favorite quote from the reading, with a quick insight into their thoughts and why they liked the quote (two sentences) and an inspirational related picture. For the Facebook post, I would ask them to write to a particular prompt that I have given them – maybe answering a couple questions, talking about the theme, setting, literary techniques, etc. (whatever I want them to get out of that chapter). And then the Snapchat would be a 1-minute video of their honest opinion about the chapter that is stated respectfully and has reasoning to back it up. I don’t know if I would use all those assignments or just some of them, and they probably wouldn’t all be done on the platforms themselves, I could create a class twitter account or class Instagram account, but it might get tricky. I would instead use an educational app or create my own website where they could post these things. The point is that the assignments would hopefully connect to these kids and to the world they live in more. Asking them to write a one sentence summary about the reading sounds boring to them, but asking them to tweet about it would hopefully be an engaging way to reach them. It would definitely take some experimenting and I’m sure there would be challenges, but it would be a fun thing to try with a class, and I hope I have the opportunity to do so someday.