Andrew Jackson's Facebook Profile

A couple years ago my 8th graders made Facebook profiles for Andrew Jackson.  I really liked this activity because it had them synthesize the material they read about Jackson into a modern-day social media profile.  I had them use a Pages template to complete their profile for Jackson.

Social media is such a huge part of our world today--and the lives' of these 8th graders!--so I thought it'd be great to bring a little bit of it into our lesson.  Like we did last week with our War of 1812 twitter challenge, we took Facebook and used history to make it come alive.

Since Facebook is blocked at school, we had to improvise a little bit.  There are some great sites out there like Fakebook that allow students to create Facebook statuses; however, I really liked the traditional Facebook layout because it asks for so much great information that can really give you a good bio or overview of a person.  So I just whipped up a template for the students to use and then they got busy creating their Facebook profiles for Andrew Jackson.  We also talked about how when they were going to list Jackson's "friends" that these didn't have to be literal "friends", but instead could be what we think of as Facebook friends: people you may not necessarily be "real" friends with, but you are on social media because you are curious as to what they're up to.

Here are a few of the profiles students created.  Once again, their creativity shines through!  The "current status" portion is my favorite: they sure come up with some funny statuses that Jackson probably could have said! :)  Enjoy!