Assignment Using Twitter: Personify Historical Figures or Characters

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Integrating technology in the classroom in innovative ways (beyond using PowerPoint slides, and Blackboard, for example), can certainly be challenging. Twitter is a fairly ubiquitous and still quite cool social media tool that may be one of the more difficult to use as a means for learning.

There are, however, a number of prominent Twitter accounts that are jokingly "authored" by historical figures of literature (@ShakespeareSays, 13.3k followers), philosophy (@ArtSchopenhauer, 5,400 followers), science (@cdarwin, 19.9k followers), etc. Although most of these are quote-of-the-day accounts (some are more aptly-named, such as @DailyPlato), others are accounts tweeting either in-character, or joking with the material surrounding the figure (as in another Shakespeare account, @Shakespeare).

@ShakespeareSays

It is this in-character tweeting that would be most interesting as a Twitter assignment. Imagine a group-based assignment for literature, using Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night: provide a prompt of a scenario and have each student in the group  tweet as one of the characters in the family. Or, in a computer science class, open a Twitter account for Ada Lovelace with access given to students who will tweet out things she may have tweeted about, including math, lines of code, even about interesting scientific discoveries of her day (she may be interacting with @CharlesBabbage quite a lot). Philosophy classes may take up Kant's philosophical thoughts and apply them to contemporary issues, like Buzzfeed or drones.

If you will have students personifying Shakespeare or another poet, it would be great to have them tweet in his or her preferred meter and rhyme scheme. Maybe by contemporizing Shakespeare through tweeting, the man and his work will become more relatable to your students.