March 14th was Albert Einstein’s birthday. I always like to do something Einstein related for the day. In the past, I’ve had students write short reports about his life but this year I decide to try something different.
I had my physics students describe Einstein by creating his Facebook profile. Since we can’t access Facebook at school, I had my students create a mock-up of the profile using Microsoft Publisher. I provide the students with a Publisher template, some screenshots of actual Facebook profiles and links to Einstein information to get them started.
I also provide the following requirements:
- interests, occupations, education and work information must be accurate
- make up some Groups and Networks that Einstein is in
- put 10 stories in his mini feed
- change his status
- add The Wall and put a few posts on it
- add two more things to his profile… something he would have in it for fun
Most of my students had fun with the activity and it was a way for them to bring a little bit of their recreational world into the classroom. Here is an example profile.
It turns out that this activity can work for objects too. Right now my ninth graders are creating profiles for the element they’ve been assigned. A few students even realized that their element (a noble gas) can’t have any friends.
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What a creative and engaging idea! I love it! I’m an English teacher and you’ve just inspired me to do the same for authors or characters in a novel. Did you just grab screenshots from your own Facebook and blank out all the info, leaving the frame for them?
Thanks for the idea, Dale!
Great idea! Thanks for sharing. I’m definitely using the idea next year to spice up the element reports my 8th grade students do.
Finally had a chance to work with a class using the template to create character profile. In a year 7 class, where small groups were working togerther, each student had to choose a character from their novels and create a page. They could then work together to come up with the “news” columns to send to their “friends”.
It worked a treat and they were all totally engaged with the task, and most, showing a real understanding of what was going ion in the books.
With some slight adaptions the template you created was a great success, with the boys not really understanding how much thinking they were putting into the task and how much it said about their reading and learning.
Thanks so much for sharing the template.