- ACTFL goal areas: cultures, communication, communities
- Level: intermediate and above
- Learning objectives: examine other people’s perspectives on a specific topic; develop a Twitter post based on students’ understanding of the selected topic
Directions
- Pick a unique hashtag for your class; for example, #UAGerman201, and check that the hashtag is not already used on Twitter.
- Ask students to look at Twitter trends based on the/a country where the target language is spoken.
- At home, students will pick one trend, examine the tweets related to it, and tweet a post between 200 to 280 characters expressing their opinion on the chosen trend, along with the class hashtag.
- Students will also explore classmates’ posts and comment on two of their tweets.
- By searching the class hashtag on Twitter students’ tweets will be retrieved.
Options and suggestions
- Twitter trends may be explored based on a specific city. This activity can take place over four weeks, with students picking and posting about a different trend each week. Twitter trends are excellent for the language classroom since they represent users’ perspectives about events and episodes currently happening around the world.