Students love it, school network administrators hate it, no matter how you look at it, Facebook is a significant part of most teens’ online lives. A colleague of mine is trying to capitalize on his students’ love of Facebook by making Facebook an integral part of his literature course. What this teacher is doing is having his students create Facebook profiles for the characters in The Great Gatsby. The activity doesn’t stop there. In addition to creating Facebook profiles for the characters he is having his students write wall posts and blogs as the character for whom they created a Facebook page. For example, the student who creates a Facebook profile for Nick might write on the wall of Facebook profile created for Daisy.

The obvious problem with this lesson is that most schools try to block access to Facebook on school computers. Despite that logistical problem, this lesson has great potential for students to really delve into character analysis.