Using Twitter to explore daily life in the past

This task was first used with a class of Year 8 History students at an all-girls selective high school studying the Stage 4 unit Japan Under the Shoguns. Students were required to draw on previous classwork on everyday life in Shogunate Japan and conduct additional research as required to create a persona from this period, such as a farmer, a samurai, a wealthy child, or even a Shogun. This persona could either be a real historical figure they had come across or a fictional persona created by the student. They then had to compose a series of ten tweets chronicling a day in the life of their persona. The only constraints were that each tweet could only be a maximum of 140 characters, and that the tweets had to be based on historical evidence from classwork or their own research.