I’m always trying to incorporate social media and pop culture into the classroom. I think the students learn best and are definitely more engaged when I do this. My only issue is that I teach middle school and some students still don’t have phones or they do but not smartphones. Another issue is that the students aren’t allowed to have their phones in class and I definitely don’t want to go against school policy. So how do I incorporate social media without making anyone feel left our or breaking the rules?
I have a few ways… One- Zachary Jones has some GREAT twitter activities on his site. There is one for about every topic and the kids think it’s súper chévere to read real tweets and apply what they’ve learned in class to the activity. Another is well, I simply improvise! I saw on Pinterest a teacher had used instagram templates to create a really neat bulletin board. I started to look for templates online, in Spanish, but was unsuccessful, so I made my own! You can use this many different ways- in class, for homework, assessment, etc… I used this assessment for my review unit with my 1B’s.
How do you incorporate social media? Are your students allowed to use their phones in class? Share your ideas🙂
Here is the assessment rubric I am using and below is the link to the template (TPT).
Instagram template (on TPT)