Research and justify selection | Building Personas Using Historical Figures | 6-8, 9-10, 11-12
Student Objective
Students will be able to:
1. explain what personas are and why they are important for understanding historical figures
2. conduct research and create a unique persona using EdTech
Instructions
Step 1: Students identify a historical figure to research
Instruct students to choose a significant person from history (e.g., inventor, leader, philosopher, activist, etc.) that they admire or connects with one of their hobbies, passions, or interests. Create a Google Slides presentation where students each create a slide sharing their selected individuals and a 1-2 sentence reasoning for selecting that person.
Step 2: Understanding personas
Share a worked example of a persona using PersonaGenerator, explaining what information they need to learn about their historical figure to create a similar persona. Teacher can select a historical figure to demonstrate or do a persona on him/her/themself in order to model how to build a persona.
Step 3: Conduct online research
Students search online for information about that person and report the information they located about that person in the form of a social media profile or persona. Once students have collected information about their person, they can create an Instagram profile for their person using this template hosted in Google Slides, or use PersonaGenerator to develop a persona.
Step 4: Create a persona class presentation
Teachers can then create a class-wide Google Slides presentation, and students can copy the PersonaGenerator or Instagram template from their own Google Slides and paste it into the class-wide presentation. In addition, students can include their rationale for selecting the person and an explanation for how they located information about their person in the speaker notes section.
Justification
This strategy has students select a historical figure that is of interest to them, and they use a search tool to locate information about that individual. After students select their historical figure, they need to explain how their selection connected to their intellectual or creative pursuits.