To Tweet, no not to Tweet, that is the question. Actually, it shouldn't be a question. Of course you should be on Twitter. It is a great professional development tool. If you are an educator, not on Twitter, you are missing out. There are countless hashtags to follow and chats to join in. Check out #langchat, #BookSnaps, #TLAP, #edcampWL, #PBLL and #MFLtwitterati to name just a few. This year, I decided to take Twitter into my AP classes. Introducing #APSpanchat. We have a weekly "slow chat" where students tweet and respond to their classmates about a given topic or question. On Friday's the question is posted. If you are considering setting up a Twitter chat with your classes, I highly recommend using Tweetdeck. It allows you to schedule your tweets and easily follow hashtags you are interested in. Here is a link to a great post about about Tweetdeck works. We spend less than five minutes at the start of the period on Twitter for our chat. It is our Friday "Do Now" (before we get to work on "Book Club Friday's - check out my post on what Friday's are like in my AP Spanish classes). This was an experiment in September. I wasn't sure how my students would respond. And, as it turned out, most of them had never been on Twitter before. So, there was a brief introduction to Twitter, an explanation about how chats work with Q1/A1 format and the importance of including our chat hashtag (#APSpanchat) in their response.
Once we were clear, we got on Twitter and started chatting. Now, I choose not to grade these Twitter chats. I like students to realize that not everything is about points, and our goal with this is a fun, new way to communicate with each other. I try to take time to individually respond or acknowledge the tweets that come in. With the Twitter app on my phone, I can do this whenever I have a few minutes of down time. Even without grading the tweets, everyone participates. They are engaged. They love reading the tweets of their classmates. A couple of times, other schools have joined in. I invite you to have your classes jump in, too (again, it's #APSpanchat). After our "trial", I asked students to tell me honestly if they enjoyed the chats and thought they were valuable. The response was virtually unanimous that they wanted to keep tweeting. So, we are almost two months in and still going. Our chat has questions aligned to the course themes for AP Spanish Language & Culture. I try to make the questions related to the theme were are discussing in class in a given week. I have decided to add to our use of Twitter, by retweeting and sharing interesting news stories and videos with my students. I tell them this is a great way to get small doses of target language practice. Many have also started following famous people in the Spanish-speaking world and get more exposure to authentic language. The next step was to have them offer brief responses to the Spanish show we watch bi-monthly in class. If you want to see those, check out #GranHotel #JPSespañol (by the way, if you have never watched the show Gran Hotel, I highly recommend it). Lastly, I recently used Twitter to connect with Francisco Jiménez the author of our current "Book Club Friday" selection Cajas de cartón. He was kind enough to respond to my tweet. My students were rather impressed that I got a response. He also linked his page on the Santa Clara University website. That, in turn, led to me writing him an email. He was so gracious as to respond and share some resources to use while teaching his books. My students were floored when I shared his response with them. They are even more interested in reading Cajas de cartón now. There is something special about hearing from the author of a book you are reading. And, this led to my sharing my initial email to Dr. Jiménez with the students. We looked at both my original message and his response and discussed writing professional emails. Even though this conversation was in Spanish, it really is a life skill. On the AP language exams, one of the free response tasks is an email response, so it also served the purpose of AP exam preparation - teacher win! My next Twitter idea is to have my students tweet something meaningful to Dr. Jiménez. I apologize to him, in advance, for the number of tweets that may come his way. Do you use Twitter for professional development? Do you use it in your classes? Please feel free to share in the comments!
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AuthorHigh school Spanish teacher in NJ. Proficiency-oriented teacher. Always looking to try new things in my classes. Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey 2019 Teacher of the Year. Archives
December 2019
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