The Suicide of Socrates – a rhyming tweetathon was inspired by Dan Krutka & Michael Milton’s terrific work, which is paraphrased, or heavily borrowed from below. If you would like to steal their great ideas, follow them on Twitter @dankrutka & @42ThinkDeep, respectively.

Even though young people are increasingly using social media in their everyday lives, educators have been slow to explore how they can extend the classroom online. The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) reported that students face a “digital disconnect” as they walk into social studies classrooms and are forced to unplug from the online world where they spend most of their time and energy. Many schools and districts block popular social media sites and ask students to keep their cell phones turned off and put away while in class. These short-sighted policies most likely prevent contemporary educators from adding an essential ingredient crucial to student engagement – relevance.

Twitter is a microblogging service where users send “small bursts of information,” called “tweets,” to others. Using Twitter with students can provide an opportunity to model valuable skills and dispositions regarding digital citizenship and social media literacies. Informal online learning environments that many young people freely join may result in the creation of participatory cultures that represent ideal learning environments.

Krutka & Milton (2013) summarized an emerging body of research that has examined the use of Twitter in education. Most students voluntarily backchannel with Twitter and this increases the understanding of course concepts. Tweeting is useful for encouraging concise writing and has even be used with first and second grade students to scaffold writing for an authentic audience — their families. Other research suggests that tweeting encourages the informal learning, or background knowledge that helps students connect their schema to a course curriculum. Also, Twitter may increase metacognitive function by promoting succinct reflection.

With this foundation, I decided to try to make the suicide of Socrates more relevant to my 9^th & 10^th grade World History students by asking them to read a primary source, retell it in rhyme, and then we would vote on the best examples by retweeting and favoriting couplets of their work. I motivated students by showing a Dan Pink video – http://www.danpink.com/2013/06/how-to-pitch-better-the-rhyming-pitch. The primary source is located here: http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/socrates.htm and the rhyming dictionary is here: http://www.rhymezone.com/. Students submitted their version of the story in at least 10 rhyming couplets. There was considerable variation in quality in the final products. The end results were highly entertaining. You can see the best couplets on Twitter by searching under the hashtag #PetriWH. Students were given a master list of the 20 best rhymes and were directed to cut the list down to 10 and properly sequence them with a beginning, middle, and end. Student engagement was high during this narrative writing exercise. This post publishes some of the better examples. We will see if this scaffolding exercise makes their formal essays better next week. A game-based formative assessment tool measured their knowledge in a fun and engaging fashion https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/16093094-257a-47c5-a48c-13c2377d8171. The big takeaway for me was that asking students to use Twitter as an educational tool was something they responded to positively. Thus, educators may be well-served to incorporate Twitter and other social media, in order to meet students in their digital world and provide 21st Century relevance to an age-old lesson. If you are not in a 1:1 classroom, your students don’t have access to Twitter, or you suffer from tech-phobia, feel free to use this template.

References

Krutka, D., & Milton, M. (2013). The Enlightenment meets Twitter: Using social media in the social studies classroom. Ohio Social Studies Review. Volume 50, Issue 12. Fall 2013.