As we finished a unit on the French Revolution, my 9th grade students had read a piece about him one night, then watched a short video and responded to some questions for homework another night.  I thought an entertaining way to check in on their understanding of him would be to create a twitter activity.  Danielle Saint Hilaire had done a similar activity with her 10th graders, which was my inspiration, and I reached out to our IT team and Alex McDonnell passed on a great pre-made slide deck with a twitter interface on it.  All I had to do was copy the interface the number of times I needed to for my particular class and we were off to the races.

     Each pair of students had to write one tweet as if they were Napoleon at some point during his life.  They had to build the whole slide – from a portrait of him, creating a handle for him, the date, the content, and at least one hashtag and one @ (whatever the right term is for that).  They were told to do this on an even numbered slide (the first one being a sort of example).  When finished, they had to pick another pairing’s Napoleon tweet and respond to it on an odd numbered slide.  They were able to get both tweets done in less than one class period’s time, giving us time to look them over.  They were clever and often quite funny.  They also had a lot of fun, leaving the class asking if we could do that again some time.

     As a teacher, I loved watching their engagement and seeing what they had retained and learned about Napoleon in this more creative and entertaining venue. -Jim