As a former Reading teacher, I love any innovative ideas to use with stories and novels!  I ran across this awesome idea and have been so excited to share with anybody and everybody.  Free Technology for Teachers (a fantastic blog to follow!) posted an update to a previous entry about using Facebook to create fictional profiles for characters from a novel.  Due to internet filtering, most teachers and students cannot access Facebook at school and it is against the Facebook user agreement to create fake accounts, making this idea pretty hard to implement. Well, Read, Write, Think has come to teacher’s rescue with a fantastic program!

Profile Publisher is their newest product that allows you to create either a personal profile or a profile for a story book character.

Not only does the Profile Publisher mimic the look of Facebook, it contains many of the features that a Facebook profile would have: Name, Personal Information, About Me, Latest Blog, and Interests.  I love the helpful hints it has for each section to help students think of what to put in each area!

Need a few ideas of how you can integrate this into your classroom?  Let me help:

  • Have students create their Personal Profile at the beginning of the year as a get-to-know you activity.
  • Create character profiles for characters in a novel or story. Have them update the profile as the story goes along…a great way to develop a much deeper understanding of who those characters are!
  • Profile a famous inventor. Make that connection between who they are and what they did!

One final benefit?  They are easy to print, and it all ends up on one page!!

Honestly, we know our kids are probably using some social networks at home, so let’s embrace the tool and find a safe way to make it work in our classrooms!