Facebook Student Projects

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• I don't have a formal set of guidelines for this project, other than a very general statement of what I expected of a creative presentation.

  Ex 4: Creative Critical Response
  Anything goes, so long as you
  1. produce something to be performed or otherwise shared during class time
  2. demonstrate your ability to engage creatively and critically with a literary text from our syllabus
  3. articulate your goals and a meaningful way of assessing your achievement
  4. reflect on your accomplishment (quoting from responses you receive from your classmates)
  In the past, students have filmed video skits, written original short stories and poetry, or published research on their weblogs. Every year I suggest interpretive dance, but so far nobody has actually done it.
  Depending on class size, everyone will have about five minutes. If you double up with a partner, the two of you will share 10 minutes.

  One student asked how long a poem would have to be; I told her I was not assigning a word count, but I reminded her that she had five minutes to fill.
  Because I wanted to encourage diversity -- one shy student brought a large posterboard, decorated with a hideous pattern, and hid behind it in the front of the room, while reading a monologue from the perspective of the wall in "The Yellow Wallpaper," while two other students did interpretive dance (wordlessly interpreting scenes in two or more different ways, and then explaining the different choices they made). Some students wrote songs, one performing it live, one putting a video of herself singing on YouTube. The Facebook projects were certainly clever, but the amount of effort it takes to create a character profile is really not nearly as much as the effort it takes to create and perform an original essay or song, so I did ask all students to turn in a short paper that demonstrated their ability to explore a topic in depth. If there was plenty of depth in their creative presentation, all they had to do was point it out. Since Facebook is an interactive medium, and the exchanges on Facebook take place over time, I would probably point out that a better project would involve some interaction and role-playing over time, rather than simply a static character profile.
  At the end of each presentation, students passed written comments to their peers. The presenter then sent me an e-mail that used quotes from student comments in order to assess the effect of the presentation, and based on my observations of the project and the student's ability to make a case that the class gained a critical understanding of the works, I assigned the grade.
  Does that help?

• I'm considering doing this activity with my tenth grade Pre-AP English students. Can you tell me more about how the project went? Did you set up guidelines? Also, did they create the Facebook using groups? Any insight would be great. Thanks.