Language of Social Media - Twitter, Hashtags and Memes in Classrooms:

As a sequel to Tom’s blog post on twitter, I would like to share one of my takeaways from “ASB Unplugged”.  Here is my little effort in bringing you a Grade 10 English classroom lesson on “The language of Social Media” particularly ‘hashtag”ging history and “meme”ing to you

The warm up exercise included the following hashtag and twitter activities.

Hashtag Exercise:

1. Choose two historical events that you studied in History class. Create hashtags that would have been effective in trending these boycotts, strikes, and instances of civil disobedience.

Tweeting Exercises

1. Define yourselves in a tweet.  Don’t think too hard about it
2. our school’s (ASB) mission statement is currently 148 characters. Shorten the statement without compromising its meaning and so that you can also use hastag #asbindia at the end.

The class shared a few of the student examples.

Hashtagging Rules:

1. Don’t overuse  2 or 3 hashtags for one post
2. Keep them short
3. Define your tag using https://tagdef.com/ to be visible on Internet
4. No punctuation in hashtags

The class was asked to read one of the following articles and discuss.

The Limits of Hashtag Activitism

Do Hashtags Court as Activism

Evaluating Hashtags:

Discussions on whether or not hashtags are effective means of instigating social change?

Next the class went on to explore “Memes”

If you want to know more about “Memes” and how to use them to connect your classroom, read this.

The students were asked to create their own memes regarding their life at ASB using

http://memegenerator.net/.  Just like the “Lays” advertisement, “No one could stop with one”, the students wanted to do more memes.

As we, the educators always do, let us innovate new ways we can incorporate twitter, hashtags and memes to make learning more effective and fun!