A couple of years ago one of my colleagues developed a lesson for The Great Gatsby in which he had students create fake Facebook profiles. His students developed profiles as if they were characters from The Great Gatsby. It was a great lesson except creating those fake profiles was a violation of the Facebook terms of service. But now, thanks to Read Write Think, my colleague can conduct the same lesson without violating the Facebook terms of service.

Read Write Think offers a free program called the Profile Publisher. Profile Publisher allows students to create and print mock-ups of social network profiles. Students can create profiles for themselves of for fictional characters. Profile Publisher includes fields for “about me,” “blog posts,” “interests,” and all of the other profile fields typically found on a social network. Completed profiles can be printed.

Applications for Education
Read Write Think’s Profile Publisher could be used in a manner similar to what my colleague did in The Great Gatsby example at the beginning of this post. The Profile Publisher could also be used by history teachers to have students create profiles of historical characters. In fact, now that I think about, I just might have some of my US History students do that.