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!

Facebook Profiles

Who doesn't love social networking, or, especially Facebook?!  Social networking is something that should be embraced in schools and used as a tool to enhance learning.  There really are so many benefits and positives to using social networking to your advantage in your classroom it's really silly not to embrace it and use it for student learning.

Recently we've been studying about our 7th president Andrew Jackson.  For the students to really get a clear picture of who Andrew Jackson really was and his make-up, they were given the task to create a Facebook profile for Andrew Jackson.

Now, there are some great online "Facebook" resources out there for students: Classtools has a Fakebook profile generator, and myfakewall.com gives you the ability to create fake Facebook status updates.  These both are great tools that I've used before, but I wanted something that the students could easily create on their own computers without an Internet connection as well as the ability to share it out with myself and their peers.

In Pages I created a Facebook profile template for the students to use.  It included everything from a current status to basic information to who their friends are.  I then had my students use this template to create a Facebook profile for Andrew Jackson.  Wow, once again I was amazed by the creativity these students possess!  It was great to see them including all of the essential facts, but also being creative with what books he'd have liked and his current status.  Check out the examples below to see what the students came up with...and feel free to contact me if you'd like the template to use in your own classroom.