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Brevity 2017
- 1. Brevity is the Soul of (t)Wit Using Twitter to Role-Play the Classics
- 2. Overview • Hi. • Background of project • What I Learned • How I Set it up in the Classroom • Assessment • Other Creative Uses of Twitter • Resources
- 3. Hi. • DanikaTipping @danikatipping • English Teacher: Central Elgin Collegiate Institute, St Thomas ON • Curriculum writer for TELO • MEd Digital Technologies
- 4. The Experiment • Can we use Twitter to role-play Hamlet in real time? • What would we learn if we tried it? • What is the value of trying this in the classroom?
- 6. The Experiment • Can we use Twitter to role-play Hamlet in real time? • What would we learn if we tried it? • What is the value of trying this in the classroom?
- 8. Multimedia
- 9. Discoveries • What happens in the wings doesn’t stay in the wings • “There are no small parts, only small actors” • Reading with purpose
- 10. How I Did It
- 11. "What is the value in re-imagining a text using social media?” Big Ideas
- 12. Be the Director Set up the Twitter accounts yourself not so much for policing but so you can see all the planning that happens through direct messages. An email account is necessary to set up a Twitter account, but I’ve found a good workaround is to use variations on a gmail address such as yourname+Hamlet@gmail.com.
- 13. When and How? While students were encouraged to tweet in character whenever they wanted, we had specific times set aside in class for discussions and tweeting.
- 14. Understudies Assign more than one person to a role if possible.
- 15. The Talking’s the Thing
- 16. A little anonymity can be powerful
- 17. Lists Create a list and add all the character handles to the list. This way people can follow a list rather than each character: eg/ https://twitter.com/Horatio_79/lists/brevity-2
- 18. Storify
- 19. Assessment
- 20. Other Applications •History: WWI Real Time •Art: Tom Thomson •Backchanneling •Homework reminders •Developing a PLN
- 21. Links • Storify • My presentation on Twitter • Brevity Twitter List • Create a fake newspaper • Padlet • Tweetdeck
- 22. The Basics
- 23. Signing up for an account • Pick a short name • Fill out your bio • Upload a picture (preferably a real one)
- 24. Connecting • Follow someone you know • Type a message like: @danikabarker Just joined Twitter. Looking to connect. • Hit enter or the send button.
- 25. Different Tweets • @ Messages: direct your message to someone’s attention.Anyone can see them. Recipients don’t have to follow you.They look like this: @danikabarker Hi!What’s up? • D Messages: can only be sent to people who follow you. Can only be seen by the recipient. They look like this: D danikabarker Hi! What’s up?
- 26. Retweets • RT: Retweeting is a way to forward interesting tweets or links to your followers.
Editor's Notes
- I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. Got inspired by a project called Such Tweet Sorrow where actors from the Royal Shakespeare company were tweeting as modern day versions of the characters from Romeo and Juliet. Thought it was a cool project because it was playing out in real time, the actors could have been anyone. All I had to interact with was their words and the way they presented themselves through their profile pictures and any media they uploaded. Hamlet in real time. Essentially: Assigned roles to all my friends who expressed interest. I played Horatio. Had them create Twitter handles and profiles. Then I spread out the play using Google calendar and basically turned the “actors” loose.
- Got inspired by a project called Such Tweet Sorrow where actors from the Royal Shakespeare company were tweeting as modern day versions of the characters from Romeo and Juliet. Thought it was a cool project because it was playing out in real time, the actors could have been anyone. All I had to interact with was their words and the way they presented themselves through their profile pictures and any media they uploaded. You could also literally interact with the characters who would sometimes respond to tweets in character.
- I wondered how hard it would be to do the same thing with Hamlet in real time. I’m basically a theatre nerd who had never had a chance to be in Hamlet. TEssentially: Assigned roles to all my friends who expressed interest
- . I played Horatio. Had them create Twitter handles and profiles. Then I spread out the play using Google calendar and basically turned the “actors” loose.
- Throughout our “production” of Hamlet, I thought about the pedagogical implications of the experiment. What was I learning? How could students benefit from this? How would I have to adapt it to make it work for students?
- Discoveries: When I first envisioned this experiment, I saw it as a performance, but I quickly discovered that the tweets where actors were just paraphrasing actual scenes from the play weren’t nearly as interesting as the conversations that were happening between characters who never really interacted during the play. Ie/ Marcellus sending security reports to Horatio, Osric trying to suck up to anyone at court who had a Twitter account, Ophelia tweeting links to music videos . The size of the role had no bearing on how much (or little) a character might tweet. For example, while Marcellus, the palace guard, only has a few scenes in Hamlet, our Marcellus was the most prolific tweeter in the cast, even going so far as to upload security footage of a ghost. It changed the way we read the rest of the play because it made the play more personal and we were reading to think about how the events of the play would affect our characters. So I took those discoveries and adapted the role play for my class.
- I started with a big idea. You can’t assume that technology will necessarily = engagement. I started with a big idea and I told them that as we studied the play Hamlet, I also wanted them to answer the following question: “What is the value in re-imagining a text using social media?” I
- I set up the Twitter accounts in advance. This was a bit of a long process but once I set them up I just kept recycling them. Keep a spreadsheet of the emails and Twitter handles you use and use a throwaway gmail account because you’ll get lots of spam from Twitter.
- Whenever, wherever some students incorporated it into their daily lives, weaving in references to winter holidays or prom But I also set up specific times for discussions and tweeting in class, usually at the end of an act. We would review the previous act’s tweets, talk about what was interesting and maybe comment on things that seemed out of character or inaccurate.
- I did this out of necessity at first because I hadn’t created 30 Twitter handles the first time around. I was also worried that no one would want to be Hamlet because they would think they’d be tweeting all the time. At first I though this was problematic because students would have to talk to their partner about what they’d be tweeting
- But then when I saw two Gertrudes get into a friendly argument about whether or not they knew Claudius had killed their first husband, I realized, hey, that’s actually a good thing! I wanted students to talk about what they were going to tweet and how they would respond to other students. I soon shifted the focus in class from the tweets, to the discussion about the tweets and I’d walk around and sit in on conversations.
- Unlike a traditional role play, these students quickly forgot who the students were behind the Twitter handles and responded only to the characters as they appeared in our role play. They also had time to formulate responses which they wouldn’t normally get. But I say a “little” anonymity because we’ve all hear the horror stories of what some people can do with total anonymity. Students knew I knew who they were. They couldn’t completely hide behind their twitter personas, but they could hide just enough that they were willing to take positive risks.
- People ask me if I used hashtags to curate all the tweets. You can do that but that takes up valuable characters and is easy to forget. In Twitter, you can create lists of users. That way people can follow the list rather than having to follow individual characters and still see all the tweets.
- The easiest way to review the tweets was to curate them using a site called Storify. Storify will pull all kinds of social media snippets together into a story depending on your parameters. Because I had all my Twitter handles on one list. I just used the list as the parameter.
- I’m a big believer in the idea that the pedagogy has to come before the tool and then you choose the right tool for the job. But sometimes you need to play with a tool before you know what it’s good at doing. After experimenting with this Twitter role play thing I discovered Twitter was really good for a few specific things: Allowing students to fully immerse themselves in a role Getting them to read with a purpose Giving them an authentic reason to know the plot and characters Getting them to make inferences Getting them to question It wasn’t a good tool for studying the language of Shakespeare or for really digging into some of the themes. So we used other teaching strategies for that. I didn’t mark the tweets—some students never tweeted, but I did assign marks to the discussions and planning and all the students were involved in that. . Although this was really just formative. I also had them do a reflection at the end where they answered the original question I proposed.
- Add handouts Links to resources Other cool Twitter things.