ELL+and+Twitter+TweetDeck

I have a student this year in my 8th grade Computer class who does not speak English, I’ll call them Alex. In researching social media techniques to use with ELL students like Alex, I came across TweetDeck. TweetDeck is linked to your Twitter account and allows you to create columns called “Collections”. One way to use this site, which makes Twitter much more manageable in my opinion, would be to have a “Collection” labeled vocabulary where the teacher could post tweets using a specific vocabulary word or tweet a picture and the students would then need to either write a definition of the word in context, identify the picture with a word, or find another tweet that uses the same word in the same way. As students became more fluent they could use the word in a sentence, write sentences about the picture, and then compose stories with other students in the class who are fluent English speakers with each tweet being the next sentence in the story.

The difficulties that may arise are with some questionable content. When I was experimenting with TweetDeck, I created a “Collection” called “Vocabulary”. I added 2 tweets that I found with the word “bat” located in them. One tweet was from @RedSox and used “bat” as a verb and the other was from @BearPile and had a picture of a stuffed animal bat with #bat listed as a tag. I then tweeted a definition for each word but when I searched for #bat some of the tweets that came up were related to porn which I would not want my students seeing or retweeting because they could not read all of the content.

[|__https://www.edutopia.org/blog/social-media-for-world-languages-sarah-wike-loyola__] [|__http://blog.esllibrary.com/2016/04/04/12-ways-to-use-twitter-with-language-learners/__] __ [] __