Language Resident: Franco Rivas Quiroz

Level: Intermediate

Class theme/topic discussed: Social Media and Technology II.  

Goal of the class:

Students will be able to:

  • Determine benefits and opportunities for social media and summarize them by designing a hypothetical social media app.
  • Practice verbs and actions used for social media tasks such as “dar me gusta, publicar, comentar, subir una historia, etc”.

Class structure:

Warm up:

Students are asked to remember and say social media-related vocabulary filling a chart on the board that breaks them down into actions, characteristics or things.  They are encouraged to ask if there are words that they want to say but are not sure how. Expected words are: viral, me gusta, compartir, bloquear, muro, perfil, inicio, subir, descargar, publicar, etc.

Activity:

Crea tu red social ideal: In couples, students will design a new and innovative social media app they would hypothetically become successful. They will do that through the following steps:

  1. Consider pros and cons of commonly used social media apps. Determine how to include the good things about it and solve the bad ones.
  2. Think about a target for the app, see how they would satisfy their costumer’s needs and what kind of content there will give.
  3. Determine the way it will be advertised and funded (are they going to use advertising on the app?, will they charge a subscription fee?, will they receive donations?, etc.”)
  4. Design the layout, main colors displayed, logo and slogan, using colored chalk.

Students present their social media app to the class.

Wrap up:

Students discuss whether they would really use that app if it existed and if they would ever stop using the ones that they already use and replace them with another activity.

Resources used: Projector, laptops.

Reflection: What worked/did not work? How can it be improved?

It seems that throughout the weeks students feel more comfortable in the class and they speak more. In general they participated well and carried out the activities creatively. I went around the room helping them understand the instructions and making sure that they were doing what they were supposed to. They ended up creating fun social media platforms that they exposed to the rest of the class. It worked well for the couples, but unfortunately in one of the groups of three people, it was clear that there was a student that was not participating very much. My way to deal with that was just go around and ask them about what they were doing at the moment. It worked apparently.