Monday, April 16, 2012

.@RealTimeGatsby - Fun with Great Literature #EngChat

I was watching the tweets coming from @TitanicRealTime and was blown away at how real everything seemed. It was just an interesting way to engage people who might not really know much about the disaster save for the movie.

My students have started reading The Great Gatsby this week and I have to say it is one of my favorite books. It is one of the most "current" books we read all year and kids tend to love it. I get excited when I tell the kids that the character of Daisy is actually based off a girl that is from our little town. Now, that might not be something to be entirely proud of, the kids get a kick out of it. There is still plenty of things kids can learn from Gatsby and I always enjoy teaching it.

This year, after seeing the Titanic tweets, I thought it might be fun to do the same with The Great Gatsby. I'm not giving this assignment as extra credit and it is not part of some larger lesson plan, I just thought it might be fun for me to do for my kids and anyone that is a fan of the book. I know that this in not a revolutionary idea. This has been done with a couple of Billy Shakespeare's plays, but I wanted to do this anyway. Here is the feed for the account.


I'm really excited to see where this fun little adventure will take me. Even though the actual story plays itself out over the course of an entire summer, I will be tweeting the story out as the students read it over the next two weeks. The kids seemed slightly intrigued about the idea, but I'm not sure how much they will buy in. You know what though, if one kid in my class loves it, it's worth the extra work.

Thanks for indulging me with this silliness. I'll keep the feed on the right had side for the duration of the Real Time Tweets and probably a bit longer. I encourage you to follow and interact with the account. Please feel free to share it with your students and just have fun with it. Really, isn't that the point of literature? Read and have fun.

If you have any suggestions for tweets, please feel free to drop me a comment or send me a tweet and I will send them out when I get to that moment in time.

- @TheNerdyTeacher

4 comments:

  1. I love this idea. The Great Gatsby turned me into an English major instead of a chemistry one, and, therein, changed my life. The idea of tweeting about any piece of literature using hashtags is a clever one. Thanks for sharing. I just shared this post with some teachers. We need to get more teachers using Twitter in inventive ways.

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  2. I wish I had had this book a few weeks ago when I taught this book! LOVE IT!!!

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  3. I love tweeting about books with our students! It has the potential to expand the classroom beyond the four walls and engage our students in a global conversation. I'm curious about a follow up to this. How did your students do? What was their feedback about this task?

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  4. I was a part of a simliar activity where we combined two classes from two different schools into casts of Romeo and Juliet. The students then tweeted out from Sunday-Thursday in character as the plot would have developed. It was great fun, especially since the students didn't know what to expect from one another and had never met. ( http://storify.com/woodchristy/rj-monday ) They happily tweeted on their own time.
    Thanks for sharing! Gatsby is one of my favourites so I love your idea to get people engaged with it.

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