Sweet Tweets About Good Reads
Here's an idea for a fun tech-social-media infused creative writing lesson and one I'll be sure to mention when I'm guest hosting the Twitter #EngChat event May 23rd at 7pm EST. The topic
will be The Power of the Product and I'll be hosting with amazing MHMS co-worker Elizabeth Singleton (@emsingleton). This conversation will consist of viable, creative, meaningful, and daring products that demonstrate information mastery, go beyond the regular research report and span the digital divide.On this second blog posting in one day (assuredly a first!) I must give a very special thank you to reading specialist & MHMS co-worker Deb Burkey! You inspired & gave me this idea during our conversation the other day talking about the Fakebook lesson. YAY, you rock! The text is written as directions to students.
Writing a short, concise, quality book review is a challenge! Using the Twitter style, create a short book review that hints at the story, not give TOO much away - add a shortened link to the
Amazon book listing (for more information, buying, and expanded book reviews) and your emotion rating.=DIf you cannot say something in 140 characters or less, then it is not worth saying. Paring a review down to 140 characters and a rating really forces reviewers to get to the essential appeal or flaw of the work being reviewed --AND it's a challenge!
Here are some examples:
Full lesson on our MHMS Learning Wikipage
How to:
To do this activity, go to our learning wiki by typing in the Google top right search box "mhms learning" we're the first hit...go to the wikipage for this lesson & get ready to have more than one window or tab open to do this. If you like multitasking, then this is the lesson for you!
1. Choose a YA book to review *you have read* (non-negotiable!)
2. Go to Amazon Books and search for your book, SAVE the URL
3. Shorten the Amazon URL using Bit.ly! Copy that URL
4. Go to Character Creator & Paste the shortened URL
5. Add your review Emoticon at the very end.
In keeping with SMS Social Media culture, the four ratings are emoticons:=D for Squee! I LOVED it!
=) for It was good - not Great!
=| for Meh...I guess it was just OK.
=( GAH! Did NOT like it a bit!
6. Write your Review in FRONT OF the URL & Emoticon
Cut out words that are unnecessary - re-word, re-think, re-write, re-mix, & be creative! Hints: use "&" rather than the word AND, dashes as breaks, but try NOT to write in leet speak. Like 
If you want to post these Tweet reviews to your school Twitter account you can also add the hashtag #booktweet before the emoticon review so that they can be searched (this is optional since Twitter is blocked by HCPSS :-(
Did you do all that and you're under 140 characters? AWEsome!7. CUT and PASTE your Tweet review from the Character Counter and put into a Word document, save it as your first initial & last name + bookreview EX. "GJonesBookReview" Don't forget to add your name on the top of the word doc and save to your documents folder &
if instructed to do so, turn this into your teacher via the Hand In folder (MHMS only)
ALTERNATIVE Google Form Submission idea: Create a Google form & embed in wikipage for kids to submit their Twitter Style Book Reviews - share that Google doc with all your teachers who are working with this lesson!
Want to teach this lesson with your kids? Go to our MHMS Learning Wiki!! Link to, or copy the wikipage (with attribution please) onto your wikipage!
Inspired by Twitter, this lesson idea & posting, and for my deep admiration for the amazing work of Icon Factory artist & creator of the Twitter Bird, Ollie David Lanham who created my beloved cartoon avatar - I bought Ollie the Twitterific Bird toy today! YAY!
Twitter Style Book Reviews by Gwyneth A. Jones - The Daring Librarian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at murrayhill.wikispaces.com.
Like that CC license? Check out the interactive Creative Commons License Generator!
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