If you’re not a user of Twitter, there’s not going to be much here for you. Just letting you know up front. 🙂
I’m sure I’m not the only Shakespeare geek on Twitter that runs periodic searches on Shakespeare terms, looking for people to help. Often this is student who seem to tweet all day long while in class, complaining about their homework.
The problem is that there’s no good way to spot the Shakespeare homework. If you just search “Shakespeare” you get, well, everything. And if you search “English homework” you get plenty of hits, but no way of telling if it’s Shakespeare related.
So, following up on idea that came directly from Twitter, I’m proposing to all my followers out there that we start using and circulating the #shakeshw tag to represent Shakespeare homework questions. I recommend that tag because you want to leave as much room in the 140 characters as possible, and the words “shakespeare” and “homework” are too darned long. “Bard” is shorter, I know, but I don’t expect that a lot of students will make that connection.
I know that most of *us* aren’t going to be doing Shakespeare homework – what I mean here is, spread the word. All you teachers out there who want to encourage your students to use Twitter as a positive resource (and not just to have people tell them the answers), encourage them to use the tag. When you do spot a question through any other search means, re-tweet it using this tag. Especially if you don’t know the answer to the question – somebody else that follows you might.
Everybody that’s interested in helping kids with their questions? Follow the tag. None of us is on constantly – but I’d bet that if enough people watch for the tag, we can get some pretty darned good coverage. When I pitched this idea on Twitter a few weeks ago, a whole bunch of people were lining up asking how they could help. Well, here’s an effort in that direction, let’s see if we can make it work.
Who’s with me?