Historical Twitter Handles?

By Mark Heintz

The strategy below is a post reading strategy that is easy to implement and gets a lot out of the students.  I have posted about how my history classes usually begin with some sort of warm up relating to documents.  Sometimes they are pictures, but usually they are a reading.  You can read more about them here.

Recently, my students read a few short paragraphs on the British East India Company. I wanted to see how much my students understood from the reading.  At the end of the reading they were asked to create a twitter handle about the document and a tweet that showcased their understanding of the passage.  This was the first time I used this strategy and I wasn't sure how it would go.  But it turned out to be pretty great. Some of the examples were pretty hilarious or very informative.

 The great thing about this strategy was the effort and thought the students put into the task.  They were reading the passage over and over again to come up with something good.  As I walked around the class, I saw students go through several drafts to get to one that was worth sharing!  Several drafts! It was suppose to be a simple post reading exercise, but ended up being an exercise in mental gymnastic that students really cared about.  At the end, some examples were shared over AppleTV.   Give it a try yourself, and let me know how it goes!