Teacher: Andressa Cardoso Ruela Branch: Nova Iguaçu Age Group: Teenagers (Basic 4) Language level: Basic Tool: Twitter I decided to join the digital immersion project this year because I am very interested in learning about technological novelties. Besides that, I am really interested in new communication tools. All means of communication fascinate me. The use of the Internet has definitely changed the way people communicate. And there is no turning back. And as English teachers, we are responsible for helping students to communicate and interact with the world. I chose to use Twitter because it was the latest and most popular trend of communication tools in cyberspace, so I wanted the students to understand this phenomenon. The group I chose was a Basic four. It was a group of 13 students ranging from eleven to thirteen years old. It was a quiet group, but they were highly motivated, some of them were always eager to participate, share their views and talk about their personal tastes during the classes. When I noticed that, I realized it would be a perfect group to work with in the project. To present the project, I asked students what they knew about Twitter, and two of the students already had a Twitter account. These two students showed the rest of the class their accounts and then we talked about the TWITTER PROJECT – that’s how I named it. I can say that the reaction was the best possible. They all agreed to open a personal account. Out of thirteen students, nine or ten got very excited about it. I decided to assign activities related to vocabulary mixed with picture descriptions and opinion polls. One of the first activities was to look up the meaning of a word and write a sentence with it. Another one was to identify the characters of movies. There were other activities like looking up examples of multiword verbs and watching videos on You Tube about endangered species and writing comments about it. Some students were motivated, engaged in the activities, but not all of them though. I reckon that, even without the participation of the entire group, the TWITTER PROJECT with this Basic 4 was a success. The students felt excited and proud to take part in the Twitter Project. The general outcome was: All of them liked the Twitter Project, all of of them liked the topics, one student mentioned that this was a very good way to keep in touch with their classmates and one student mentioned the high level of interactivity of the activities.
It seemed to me that students really felt more confident about the fact that they can really communicate in English. In fact, they were already doing it. I would definitely do this project again. I hope we can continue next semester. And if I were to suggest any changes, it would be about the topics. There should more room for topics that come up during the class, activities and discussion about current news or celebrities .During the project we wrote about topics related to the lessons contents, in a way to expand vocabulary or practice the grammar explained, but I tried to avoid making it seem like homework. The project should last a little longer, from eight to ten weeks. If there had been more time, there would have been more participation from this group. Finally, the digital immersion project helped me to understand this powerful new communication tool - twitter - and I took a big step towards the comprehension of how it can be used as a pedagogical tool. There is still a lot to be learned by us teachers. It was also really important in the way that I had to keep a group highly motivated about a project during its whole implementation and duration. And, as I said before, I think it was really successful.