In my lessons this week, Year 9 will be continuing with their tectonics unit of work. Over the past two years we have looked at the Sichuan earthquakes in China to identify how people are affected by and respond to earthquakes.
Clearly the devastating earthquake that stuck Haiti earlier in the week will be in the minds of students, therefore we will be looking into the causes, effects and responses to the Haiti earthquake in lessons this week.
Below is a quick activity to help pupils learn about the earthquake in ‘real time’ using twitter. A twitter colleague of mine highlighted this news report in the Guardian which shows a resident of Haiti (Richard Morse) tweeting through the days after the earthquake struck. This got me thinking about how I could use this information with my pupils?
I have placed the tweets into a presentation that is available to download from slideshare. The presentation is timed to move forward after a set amount of time after each slide. This will then act as a twitter ‘feed’ of events. I have then adapted a piece of work by Tony Cassidy to use alongside the tweets. The Haiti Emotion Line asks pupils to graph the emotions of Richard Morse at the end of each day and to then explain their decisions related to his emotional state.
I feel that using live information from a source such as Twitter allows students to gain a real purpose to studying world events such as the Haiti earthquake.
