Twitter!

I finally found a way to incorporate Twitter in the classroom!  Since the subjunctive is such a hard thing for English speakers to grasp, I wanted to show my Spanish V's how it is used authentically. Twitter is a great source for authentic language in a foreign language classroom. The students really seemed engaged for the entire activity and learned some new vocabulary along the way.  

This is how it worked:

I created a Twitter account with my school email address and had everyone log in with that account. Some students have their own account, but I wanted to be sure the distractions were minimal so I asked that they all log in with the new account. 

• This is where I ran into some problems with my larger group since there are limits on the amount of time one can be on Twitter and the locations they are using.  Luckily, they got enough information before the account crashed.

Once we were all connected, I had students search for the adverbial clauses in quotation marks.  For the phrase "con tal de que" all of the tweets appeared using some form of the subjunctive. It was interesting for the kids to see authentic language in a way they are accustomed to. Out of the 8 clauses we are working with, I wanted them to search for 5 and write down 3 examples of the clause and the subjunctive in their notebooks.  We got some good information and we were able to analyze the grammar together on the Smartboard once they sent their favorite tweet to Polleverywhere using the computers or their phones.

Overall, I liked how the activity worked out...although I would make the length of the activity a bit shorter. That would help ensure that the twitter account would not crash.

If you have any other ideas for using Twitter in the classroom, please share below!

Students searching for subjunctive on Twitter.