I wrote a blog post about an idea that came to me to use the popular "Be like Bill" meme template for students to create historical ones. Read that post here.
Students were required to create TWO "Be Like Bill" Memes.
- One had to be over Andrew Jackson
- One had to be over another person from early American History 1800-1900. It could be someone we have talked about already, someone we would talk about, or just someone they want to look up.
- One meme had to be positive "Be like..."
- One had to be negative "Don't be like..."
- They had to create the meme on the iPad.
So, what did I learn with this activity? What would I do different next time?
- The first time I assign this activity to the students I should probably only require one. It would make it a quicker assignment. This took a little longer than I wanted to spend.
- I would require students to provide evidence to support their meme. This way they have documents to back up their meme.
- I could ramp this up a bit and require students to do some research on the "other person" of the meme requirement. This would force students to site their sources. Once I told them they could do any other person from American history, they went straight for the internet. Some even copied text directly out of Wikipedia into their meme. Not cool. I need to do a better job in this area!