Twitter Lessons for Authentic Communication in Spanish Class

Profile pic of @twitter_es

Inspired by @cbloodworth 's blog post "12 Ways I Hope to Use Twitter in My Spanish Classes this Year", I thought I'd post a few of my favorite uses of Twitter in my Spanish classes over the past year.


First of all, in case this isn't obvious to everyone, I have my Twitter account in Spanish so that whenever I show tweets to my students they are immersed in the likes of "¿Qué está pasando?" and "hace 22 minutos".

I also set my Trending Topics to "México". As you can see from the screenshot below, there's currently not much of interest. (Well, maybe there would be if I could figure out what the heck #iconospotosinos was all about or if my students followed soccer (Carlos Salcido) but we're in the Philippines and we like basketball.) Occasionally, though, I find some real gems.

The most valuable use of Twitter for me is the ability to tap into the absolutely authentic and current conversation that is going on among Spanish speakers. Students with limited language ability get to experience the diversity of ideas and perspectives across the Spanish speaking world. Because tweets are limited in length, I've found that my students are more willing to struggle to figure out the sentiments of the twitterer that if they were reading a series of articles or even blog posts.


#FuerzaMineros Twitter Lesson
One of the biggest news stories last year was that of the Chilean miners who were trapped for 69 days. I used Twitter in my classroom to follow the trapped Chilean miners story and the outpouring of support from across Latin America. As an aside, it looks like a year later the miners aren't doing so well. It could be interesting to revisit those tweets and contrast them with their current situation. One of the core themes of IB Spanish is media and I can see a lot of potential for discussion on that theme with this topic.

#Diadelosmuertos and #Lutoxmexico Twitter Lesson
Last October I was searching for tweets to show my students on Día de los Muertos and discovered that Mexicans were more preoccupied by the death of 14 teenagers in Juárez at the hands of drug traffickers than with the death of their grandparents. I created this slideshow with the tweets that I compiled by searching #juarez and #lutoxmexico.

Luto x Mexico

View more presentations from Catherine Savage

#Bicentenario Twitter Lesson
My students analyzed tweets with the hashtag #Bicentenario to understanding the controversy over celebrating Mexico's Bicentennial in the midst of a drug war. The level of analysis can vary depending on the level of your students. For some of my classes, the ability to determine if the twitterer's viewpoint was ¿positivo o negativo? was enough. The assignment was for students to write a blog entry that incorporated tweets as well as other web 2.0 elements.

#Spanishrevolution Twitter Blog Post
I created a blog post that compiled tweets and other web 2.0 elements to help students understand the recent protests in Spain.

Alejandro Sanz and Honduras Twitter Lesson
Here is a PPT of some tweets and tweetpics from the Spanish singer @AlejandroSanz when he visited Honduras for a concert. I used this when I taught the bilingual song "Looking for Paradise" to talk a little bit about a country that rarely gets the spotlight.

Grammar Twitter Lessons
In addition to the above uses of Twitter that focus on current events, I've also found great Twitter trends and hashtags that allow students to read, practice and use different grammatical structures (and usually get a chuckle out of it at the same time).

#Cuandoerachico - Joining Twitter trend to practice imperfect tense.
#SiLennonFueraMexicano PPT - I have a student who is a big Beatles fan and when I saw this trending topic, I knew I had to use it in class. There are frequently variations on the same theme like #siharrypotterfueramexicano that give students the opportunity to practice the conditional tense and sometimes give some insight on the target culture, although you do have to be careful of reinforcing stereotypes with some of the tweets.

Lastly, several of my students are Korean and they thoroughly enjoyed seeing Koreans wishing the Twitterverse "¡Felíz Chuseok desde Madríd!".  (Chuseok is Korean Thanksgiving/harvest feast.) I can't find my collection of those tweets, though. Oops.

For the 2011-2012 school year I am excited to try out some of the really cool Twiccionario worksheets at  @ZJonesSpanish's Zambombazo and I will be keeping an eye on the Spanish-speaking twitterverse for new opportunities to bring the Spanish-speaking world's ongoing conversation into my classroom.

Jajaja - I guess I spoke too soon above about there being no worthwhile Mexican trending topics right at this moment :-)

Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gdsdigital/ / CC BY 2.0

Embedding Tweets

I was just reading Sue Waters' recent post on how to embed a tweet from Twitter using Blackbird Pie and ran back over here to try it out. Pretty cool!

But then I was having a heck of a time putting two Blackbird Pie embedded tweets in this blog post. One worked perfectly fine the first time I tried it, but pasting the second tweet's HTML created a mess. They would show up but with a dark blue background throughout and then with both of them having the Pedro Suarez background, and then dark blue again! So I searched for other options and found TweetPaste. (That is the tweet from Gael Garcia Bernal above, RE Arizona immigration politics.) It worked very easily and caused no problems with the Pedro Suarez tweet (embedded using Blackbird Pie below).

As far as application in the Spanish/MFL classroom, I see myself using this tool in my class blog. I love the #seispalabras tweets but never really new what to do with them before. I think that I will start to incorporate them into posts where I can. They are often poetic and witty and with only six words, very accessible to beginner and intermediate level Spanish students.
I also like to show my students tweets of popular Spanish artists that they are familiar with. So far I've found Mexican singer Julieta Venegas, Peruvian singer and environmental activist Pedro Suarez Vertiz, and Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal to be frequent twitterers with comprehensible (for Spanish students) tweets. Does anyone know of any other good Spanish-speaking celebrities/authors/leaders that are worth following?

This is Pedro Suarez' tweet of encouragement to Ricky Martin when he made his sexual orientation public.

...ayer fue una moda y hoy es un HOMBRE ante todo, hoy fue el mejor momento…less than a minute ago via webPedro Suárez-Vértiz
PedSuarezVertiz

The Blackbird Pie site states:

TO DO: shorter code; real timestamp.

When they do that, then the tool will really be cool. As of now, it looks kind of stupid posting the Suarez tweet with a "less than a minute ago" time stamp.

Cinco de Mayo con tamales y música conmovedora

Yesterday I celebrated Cinco de Mayo by cooking tamales with my students. This is the third year in a row that I have done this. The last two years I taught middle school Spanish to a reluctant audience. Spanish was required for all students and "Why do we have to learn Mexican!" was heard on more than one occasion from parents and students alike. Echoing the sentiments of the country at large, many of my students had no interest in adopting a foreign language but they cheered at the prospect of adopting a delicious new cuisine.

This photo is by Joe Marinaro.

Cooking with students (especially middle school students) can be very rewarding. I have noticed that some of the most poorly-behaved students in the regular classroom setting are the most mature and responsible in the kitchen. (It turns out that they are the ones cooking mac and cheese for their younger siblings while mom is working the late shift at McDonald's.) Tamales are a great food to cook with a class because there is so much to do and the more pairs of hands, the better. When I taught middle school worked out a wonderfully developmentally-appropriate system. The 6th graders shredded the meat with their fingers first thing in the morning, the 8th graders worked on the more complicated steps like seasoning the meat and mixing the batter, and then the seventh graders would dutifully wrap all of the tamales up in corn husks.

I follow this recipe. The first time I ever made tamales was with my students my first year of teaching. I know, such an idiot! BUT, that should attest to the quality of the recipe. The recipe suggests cooking the meat on the first day and then preparing the tamales the following day. I broke it down one step further and boiled all the meat at my house the night before cooking we cooked in class. Then at school we prepared the meat and the tamales (each class working on a different step throughout the day). Then the following day I steamed the big pot of tamales early in the morning and we ate them in class. (Obviously, or not, the steaming time will be longer if you are starting with refrigerated tamales.) Another option, which I did for this Cinco de Mayo, is cooking the tamales right after they are prepared. I let them cool and then I stored them in the refrigerator overnight. It's possible to either steam them or microwave them before serving them in class.

My middle school had a science lab with four stoves and lab tables but you really only need one burner or possibly even just a microwave. The only actual cociendo that you have to do with the kids is warming the seasoning and the broth. You also need to secure enough refrigerator space for storing tamales and meat between classes and overnight before you cook them. The hardest part for me has been organizing enough tables, cookie sheets, cutting boards, and bowls so that you can divide up the ingredients and spread them out. Then the kids can work in groups of two to four and have enough space.

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I usually show some kind of short video on Cinco de Mayo and the Battle at Puebla and explain how it's not Independence Day yadda, yadda. And then with middle school we eat and play a review game that the kids like. With older kids, or higher level middle schoolers, I like to teach the song Los hijos de Hernandez by Los Tigres del Norte. It's about Mexicans who "take the place" of anglos in different ways. Like many of Los Tigres' songs that recount the experiences of the Mexican working class, Los hijos de Hernandez uses very straightforward language to paint an empathetic portrait of Mexican immigrants that is difficult to deny. And in light of recent political posturing on immigration, we could use a little empathy and understanding. It is also really appropriate for Cinco de Mayo because it demonstrates the military link between the US and Mexico that has existed since the Battle of Puebla in 1862. 

Here's a CLOZE activity for the song with some new vocabulary. I really like CLOZE activities because it gives me a reason to play the song enough times for students to start to like it and think it's catchy. Then I explain the new vocabulary, any major grammar (i.e. if it ends in aba or ía it is past tense), I ask them to predict the general theme of the song, and then we go through translating the song and discussing what kind of statement the artist is trying to make. You can download this document by clicking EXPORT.




I'd love to read any comments on this topic. Do you have any special Cinco de Mayo activities that have passed the test of time? Or maybe you have an idea or resource that you haven't had the chance to try yet? Have you had success cooking with language classes? What are the most difficult obstacles that you've had to deal with?

Any other good music related to Cinco de Mayo? Being out of the country, it's difficult to know the degree to which the recent events in Arizona have impacted students' ideas in different parts of the country. How do you think your students would react to the themes in Los hijos de Hernandez?

Teaching UN Millennium Development Goals in Spanish Class

I recently showed The Mission to my seniors. I recommend watching it - it is available for rent on iTunes. It was my students' last week of classes. They were kind of done with reviewing for the exam so I wrote out a few short synopses in Spanish of different movies I have access to (I'm in the Philippines so no Netflix) and I assigned them to read the descriptions and write a persuasive letter to me telling why they wanted to watch one of the movies over the others. My hunch is that the words "Robert De Niro" caught their eye and they zeroed in on The Mission. For a second I felt bad allowing them to watch an English language film in Spanish class, but I quickly reassured myself that it is an amazing movie with a strong social justice message for soon-to-be college freshman. (Note: And in my own  personal practicing-Catholic opinion, it's especially poignant and heart-breaking when viewed in light of the Catholic Church's current/repeated struggles over self-preservation versus the need to protect its most innocent members.) 

The Mission reminded me of my own personal mission as a teacher that I haven't had time to think much less act upon since taking my current job at an exclusive private prep school: to instill in my students the ethic that with great power and privilege comes great responsibility, and a compassion for those less fortunate than themselves which motivates them toward action.

That brings me to this project. My goal is to write in this blog an outline of ideas and resources for integrating lessons on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals into Spanish units for beginning and intermediate levels. I hope to do this in a way that facilitates authentic use of the target language as well as enhanced student engagement in poverty issues.

The foreign language classroom is an optimal place for educating young people about global poverty, social justice, and specifically the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Learning a foreign language is opening a window to the people, language and culture that are different from our own. While I currently teach very privileged children, even when my students were of a much lower socioeconomic level they never came close to experiencing the level of poverty that the MDG's are aimed at addressing. It is our job to make sure that they are taught about it.

As far as structure, I think that I will devote two posts to each MDG/development issue. The first will be explicitly related to teaching the MDG as such and the second will have additional resources that are related to that development/social issue. For example, the first post will address MDG #2: Achieve universal primary school enrollment and the second post will address other aspects of education in a social justice/poverty context. 


Each post is not by any means meant to be a finished product. Rather I hope that it can serve as a jumping off point. Reading the posts to come may spark an idea about poverty and social justice education in the foreign language classroom. Or maybe you have an experience with some activity or resource that you'd like to share. I invite you to please leave a comment with ideas, questions, concerns, experiences.

So, what do you think? Do you think that this is the place to teach students about global poverty? Does this emphasis create a misconception among our students that Spanish is a "third-world language=poor" language? I will say one thing, I do regret painting a one-sided view by telling my seventh graders a few years ago that "I'll have to look up the word for 'toilet' because I don't know it... I didn't have a toilet when I lived in Peru." I was merely stating a fact, but I think that the statement could have been contextualized a bit more for better understanding.   

Creating Personal Spanish Blogs

Here is a collection of thoughts and reflections on my experience creating personal Spanish blogs with my high school intermediate and beginner Spanish students. I would love to hear additional tips, ideas, experiences, and lessons learned from anyone who has done blogging in the foreign language classroom or otherwise. I plan on adding to this entry as the project continues.


Goal: To improve students’ reading and writing skills in Spanish.

·      To provide opportunities for authentic communication in target language

·      To provide opportunities for students to interact with native speakers

·      To emulate characteristics of an immersion language learning experience using web 2.0

Blogging platform?
I used Blogger because I was familiar with it and it is free, widely used, and relatively simple to set up. It requires a bit of up front time investment getting students to follow each other's blogs and add subscription links but it has worked well.

Set-up?
I would recommend spending a class period in the computer lab with an LCD projector walking the students through the creation of their own blog including the following extras:

·      Get the gadget “Subscription Links” (layout/add gadget)

·      Get the gadget “Labels” (layout/add gadget)

·      Set comments to allow anyone to comment (settings/comments)

·      Remove the word verification for comments (settings/comments)

·      If students use e-mail, have them get comment notification by e-mail (settings/comments)

Alternatives?
You may decide that to begin with, it may serve your students better to have one class blog where all students are able to write posts and comments on the same blog. You can set this up under (settings/permissions) although I think that there is a maximum of 10 authors allowed.

What else?
Students need to learn how to access and use their Google Reader so that they find out immediately when someone has posted or commented. If they don’t use this and have subscriptions to all their classmates’ blog posts AND comments, then it is unlikely that they will be active bloggers.

Assessment?
I used the following rubric to grade the first 6 weeks of blogging. The criteria for grading are BLOG USAGE / PROGRESS & IMPROVEMENT / PERSONAL EXPRESSION / QUALITY OF SPANISH. In the future I would place more weight on BLOG USAGE so that students are motivated first and foremost to use the blog. I am assigning 4 required blog posts with specified topics/objectives (about every other week) and then students are expected to write personal (unassigned) posts regularly. 

Management?
Just as it is for anyone who blogs, getting comments is the biggest motivator for students to write frequently. As the teacher, you are charged with giving timely, personalized, and motivating comments to pull students into the habit of checking their reader for now posts and new comments. This is time-consuming but worth it. I am still in this beginning stage so I do not know about the time commitment of long-term blog management.


Other ideas?
Create BEST BLOG badges and send them to the most creative blog or the most prolific blogger.
Write about a particularly interesting or thoughtful post of one of your student’s thereby directing traffic to their blog.  (Like real bloggers).

Brainstorming ideas for required blog posts?

·      Introduce yourself to the world

·      Post your favorite YouTube video and tell why you like it

·      Write your daily routine

·      Describe a time when you got sick

·      Do one of those 25 question things that goes around FaceBook

·      Write about your plans for the summer

·      Rate your town on a scale of 0 to 10 and explain why you gave that rating (classmates may have other ideas about how they would rate the town)

Ultimate goal / next step:
Find Spanish students in other countries who want to be blog amigos.
Make connections with native Spanish-speaking students with whom we can have blog-exchanges.

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If you have any ideas or questions, please leave a comment.