I reviewed the article: Social Media and ELT. The article explains that the brain releases dopamine when a person learns small bits of information, such as what students can find in social media. The article explains that this creates an addiction to social media. There is a video in this article where the speaker states that the instructor should ask the students which social media outlets they use and how they use it. I hadn't considered asking Spanish students this, but it might be a good idea to survey Spanish students in the Spanish department to see what social media they use now, how they use it, how often they use it, and how they feel about it being used to teach culture. This article also had some great ideas on how to use social media to teach a language. The language focus in this article was to teach English, but the same principles can be applied to Spanish.
Search ideas: social media for Spanish learner/students, social media to teach/ instructSpanish, social media for language learners/students, social media to teach/instruct languages, social media in linguistics
I also read the article: Social media, language learning tool. It descibes a major drop of interest in learning languages. It suggests several social media options and gives ideas on how to use them. I wasn't aware that Facebook had translation capability through bing. I like that the example use of social media has students use the translation and explain what went wrong in translation. It's another great idea for using social media. I was considering using most of the social media tools mentioned in this article and I'm very glad to see them mentioned. According to this article, there are few language instructors using social media.
To do next week
Find articles by using the search words I selected. Search the social media tools that I am interested in using and see if the article was correct that there are few instructors there. Put together a survey for students to see which social media tools they use, how they use them, when they use them, and how they feel about using them to learn Spanish culture. I would like to hold onto the survey until I read more articles to see what other questions I might have and the survey has been reviewed. I would also like to complete the about this study on this website.