My middle school students LOVE MySpace. So much so, that our school has had to block the site on our computers due to students wanting to log-on during school hours. Older generations of teachers are scared of MySpace, due to the bad press it has received concerning child predators and the like. However, many parents closely monitor their teen's MySpace page and keep tabs on their internet activity. Students communicate after school through their personal MySpace pages and spend lots of time updating and maintaining their sites so it reflects their personality. I really wanted to come up with a way to
tie MySpace into a lesson plan because just the name "MySpace" immediately peaks their interest! Students love lessons that they can relate to, and in this lesson, you will definitely be able to involve a student in a subject that is traditionally considered stale and boring.
Before reading a piece of classic literature, I always like to give background on the author. Before reading "The Tell-Tale Heart" I do a small lesson on the back ground of Edgar Allan Poe that details his tragic life and times. My goal is for the students to tie the author's personal experiences to the literary term "author's purpose", but I didn't know of a great way to do this. Usually, I would copy off a page of information about the author, we would read it together, and that was that. Students would wander during the reading and zone out, not interested at all in the boring piece I had revamped from the encyclopedia or photo-copied out of our literature book. The students were not retaining and certainly not caring about the author's background.
This year, before passing out my information on Poe, I told the students that we would create a MySpace page for Poe, based on the information we discovered from the background sheet. Like I had said before, our school has blocked access to MySpace, but I decided I could overcome this minor obstacle! Using Microsoft Word, I created my own version of a MySpace sheet, I titled "AuthorSpace" and used the clipart shapes to re-create similar graphics and headings familiar to an actual MySpace page. I found a picture of Poe that I pasted on the sheet and included several blank boxes with the familiar "About Me", "Books", "Movies", "Heroes", and "Music" titles over my boxes. I informed the students that the "About Me" box should have a four to five sentence summary of the background sheet, but that the other boxes they could get creative with and "infer" what Poe would like to answer in those boxes, if he were alive today. Students were also instructed to decorate the paper and create a background that they felt reflected Poe's personality.
Students loved the assignment and actually paid attention to the background information so their MySpace pages were accurate and unique. It was also interesting, and rather comical, to see what they thought Edgar Allan Poe would like if he were alive today. Many students felt his favorite movie would be The Saw series, and his "hero" would be Stephen King! You can use this activity with any author of your choosing, and if you have a hip school (that doesn't block MySpace) you could even have them create "real" MySpace pages for your author!