For this project using Twitter, I have students create a twitter account separate from any personal twitter account they may already have. Once they create their account, they begin following organizations in the target language that will give them news related to current events and pop culture. I encourage some personalization of their twitter pages but emphasize that students need to be discreet and appropriate. While this is a “Social” media, we are using it in an academic setting for mostly academic purposes. Once students are following their classmates (and instructor), they are ready to begin tweeting. Next, I assign a topic from our course (food, music, technology, etc.) for students to tweet about in Spanish. I assign two tweets per topic weekly or bi-weekly depending on the course pace.

Now, in order to make this relevant in class, I ask that students use a unique hashtag so I am able to filter the tweets to see only our classes tweets on any given day in class. This makes it easy to see the tweets and show them to the class in one space. I follow up by showing the hashtag in class and asking students to read a tweet, and I follow up with questions to have them elaborate on their thought. It has been an excellent way for students to enjoy writing and connecting with each other outside of class with our given topics. I use this tool as a participation measure and I do not grade tweets for accuracy. My goal is comprehensible communication and not perfect grammar. As I see common errors, I will go over those as an additional follow up; otherwise, students receive completion credit for doing the required amount of tweets for each topic. Listen and watch the video to see and hear what this looks like with some more details and thanks for checking this out!

COPYRIGHT & CREDIT

Patrick Murphy

Vanderbilt University

March 18, 2019