Motivate Your Writers by Using MySpace

For those of you trying desperately to motivate apathetic students, tap into their enthusiasm for digital technology. Mark Sopko, River Forest Jr/Sr HS teacher (Hobart, IN), asks students to develop mock MySpace pages for different characters in their literature. This not only targets reading comprehension and summarization but also gets students to make inferences about a character. Students have to think beyond the literal details in the text and anticipate a character’s feelings, needs, and wants. By putting themselves in the character’s shoes, this activity also targets point of view. Thanks Mark! Love it!

Download Mark’s MySpace template. Of course you could easily change the components and information based on the characters you’re studying.