I love my Twitter PLN because it's the best resource I have as a foreign language teacher. Take last week as an example. It was homecoming week and kids are always craziest during that week. Friday is the worst of the week with the shortened classes to accommodate the pep rally. I knew I needed a better activity to keep kids engaged and Twitter delivered. A French teacher shared her Selfie Bingo activity, so I scooped it up and made it work for my classes.
I decided that I didn't want to contain this activity within my classroom because the kids would be antsy and needed to move around, so I made this activity like a scavenger hunt. I wrote the selfie directions with Quizlet so that I could print them out in a large format and change them anytime I want. An added benefit is that you can simply copy the Quizlet set to your own account and edit them the way you want as well. You can find the selfie descriptions Here. Each selfie description was marked with B1 B2, B3...I1, I2, I3...etc so students could mark their own BINGO sheets and selfies. I tried to make sure to make instructions that could be met using Snap Chat filters so students could easily make the selfie and move on. Finally, I cut the questions out and taped them all over the school in places that would cause the least disruption; like stair wells and commons areas.
At the beginning of each class, I put students into groups of 3-4 and gave each group a blank BINGO sheet. I then showed them my example of a selfie that I've shared here. I showed them that they had to not only take a selfie specified by the directions , but also had to write what the selfie was of and specify which BINGO square it covered. The team that was first to BINGO and the team that filled the most squares would get extra credit. Students uploaded their selfies to an file I created on schoology.com, but you can use any number of collaborative sites for this. After that, I let them loose on the school and everyone seemed to have a good time with very few complaints from my colleagues.
I decided that I didn't want to contain this activity within my classroom because the kids would be antsy and needed to move around, so I made this activity like a scavenger hunt. I wrote the selfie directions with Quizlet so that I could print them out in a large format and change them anytime I want. An added benefit is that you can simply copy the Quizlet set to your own account and edit them the way you want as well. You can find the selfie descriptions Here. Each selfie description was marked with B1 B2, B3...I1, I2, I3...etc so students could mark their own BINGO sheets and selfies. I tried to make sure to make instructions that could be met using Snap Chat filters so students could easily make the selfie and move on. Finally, I cut the questions out and taped them all over the school in places that would cause the least disruption; like stair wells and commons areas.
At the beginning of each class, I put students into groups of 3-4 and gave each group a blank BINGO sheet. I then showed them my example of a selfie that I've shared here. I showed them that they had to not only take a selfie specified by the directions , but also had to write what the selfie was of and specify which BINGO square it covered. The team that was first to BINGO and the team that filled the most squares would get extra credit. Students uploaded their selfies to an file I created on schoology.com, but you can use any number of collaborative sites for this. After that, I let them loose on the school and everyone seemed to have a good time with very few complaints from my colleagues.
A few take aways. This activity, in the end, turned out to be very entertaining for the students, but don't expect them to stay in the target language while they're out and about. You're going to have to give up the dream of 90% TL with this activity. I'm not sure how much language was learned, but I'm certain they understand "algo" and "alguien" much better than they did before. Also, they misunderstood some of the instructions that had to do with classrooms and teachers. For example, one of the instructions was to take a picture IN FRONT of their favorite class. I did this so that they wouldn't disrupt that class by going in, but that's exactly what many students did. Also, one of the selfies was to be with one of the 4 administrators. Well, I have 6 Spanish classes, so my administrators took selfies with students all day long. So, in the future, I'll change that to include counselors, kitchen staff and custodians so that my poor administrators aren't besieged with selfie requests all day. Finally, I think this activity was the perfect weird week activity. Homecoming, short week, early out, etc are tough to plan for. My students loved it, they moved around letting off steam and engaged the language in a fun way.
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