Civil Rights Mini Lesson

This lesson is more of a review lesson and done towards the end of a unit or could be done as a final project for a unit. In this lesson, students will each be assigned a historical figure that was influential during the Civil Rights Movement. For lack of time in this specific lesson, students will also get a paragraph of information about their person as a refresher of what they learned. They will then take the information they learned over the course of the unit and make 10 tweets from the perspective of their historical figure. Students will have some time to do a bit more research (or look in their notes) to remember more information about their historical figure. Once students have completed their 10 tweets on the Padlet file below, each student will share of their favorite tweets and explain why they thought that their historical figure would have tweeted that if there was social media during their lifetime.

This lesson can be used in all grades. I have witnessed it being used it in middle school and high school classrooms and seen students more engaged in the work, since it combines something else they are very interested in, social media. While there are many variations to this, Padlet might be more useful in a junior or senior high school classroom or even a college class. The only thing with Padlet is that you might want to be able to filter through the tweets before projecting them, in case some students get post things that are not necessary. Another way to modify this lesson might be to find or make a template of a tweeter feed and print it out for students to write their tweets out. Students are allowed and encouraged to use their notes and do more research to find more information on their historical figure to make their tweets more accurate as well.