Terry Freedman has recently released the 2nd Edition of his Web 2.0 Projects Book which includes my Twitter project about the Gunpowder Plot so I thought I’d better write a post about it.
The project came about when I was looking at how web-based resources could be used in other subjects. I chose History and the Gunpowder plot simply because it was the beginning of November. I worked with a small group of children and we looked at a few different sites. We used Wallwisher to gather information about those involved in the plot and other teachers then posted questions for the children to answer (http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/guyfawkes). We talked about the reasons for the Plot and looked at why James I was the target. Using www.geni.com we created a family tree for the Royal Family connecting James I back to the Tudors. We also used www.dipity.com to create a timeline of the events.
The most succesful part of the project was Robert Catesby’s Twitter account. Catesby was the leader of the plot and we researched and tweeted the events following Guy Fawkes’ capture. We wrote the tweets describing the plotters desperate attempts to avoid capture and the final stand at Holbeche House. We used www.hootsuite.com to schedule the tweets so that over the days from the 5th to 8th November tweets would sometimes be sent late at night. The tweets describing the final stand at Holbeche at Catesby’s death appeared early on a Sunday Morning.
Following on from the tweets I then set up a second Wallwisher to gather feedback from some of the 61 followers that Robert Catesby received.
I hope to run this project again this year and would really like to make it a collaborative effort so that other schools could tweet as other characters from the story.
Chris Leach 