Using Social Media to Teach Writing : A Lesson Plan for Steemhomework
As an English teacher, I try to teach my students in the most effective and communicative ways. I want my students can learn English in accordance with the learning objectives. In the concept of learning, I emphasize to my students to learn English as a language rather than a science. This I did to make the students able to use English as a communication tool. Thus, the result will be on the communicative aspect. Therefore, 4 major skills in English are the main objectives of language learning; namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
One of the topics I taught last semester was the descriptive text. To achieve the learning objectives of the descriptive text, the students should be able to write descriptive texts on how to describe a person, a place or something in accordance with the English features. Typically, I use some media in teaching the topic such as pictures of an object to be described, video and even the use of social media like Instagram.
On this occasion, I would like to create a lesson plan on how to use Instagram as one of the media used to improve the ability of writing descriptive text.
Introduction
I started my English class by introducing the learning topic to students. The topic of learning is How does it look like?. In this topic I explain the definition of descriptive text, the purpose of using descriptive text and language features used in descriptive text. Before I end the introduction session, I make sure that students understand the text with some questions.
- What is descriptive text?
- What is the main purpose of deskriptive text?
- What are language features of descriptive text?
Basic Language Competence
Based on the above introduction, there are 3 basic competencies of students in learning descriptive text, they are:
- Students should be familiar with descriptive text.
- students should be able to understand the definition, the main purpose and the language feature of descriptive text.
- Students are able to write a descriptive text based on identification, facial feature and personality
Learning Activities
I divide the activity into two parts; activities in the classroom and activities outside the classroom. For activities in the classroom is a formal learning activity where teachers start with the introduction of the topics and discussion.
- Teachers introduce materials and learning topics to students by explaining the definition, purpose and language features of descriptive text.
- Teachers provide examples of the use of descriptive text in daily life.
- Teachers demonstrate some pictures of famous characters and places, then ask students to describe the facial appearance of the images.
- Teacher distributes students into groups. Then, the students choose the object for their description.
- After 10 minutes, one representative of the group describes the object they chose in front of the other groups.
- After the representatives of each group finished describing the object, the teacher draws conclusions from the lesson and explains the activities that will be done by the students outside the classroom using Instagram to describe a place through the photo.
Activities outside the classroom
- Each student selects one of the historic places or tourist destinations in their city, then they photograph the place.
- Students share the photo through Instagram and write descriptive text on Instagram caption column to describe the place they have photographed (min. 3 paragraphs).
- Before sharing the photo each student must ensure that they have mentioned the teacher's Instagram's username so that the teacher can check their text.
- The teacher can give the activity deadline for 5 or 3 days.
Conclusion
The use of social media for language learning is very important since they are very popular nowadays. The teacher can use various social media in his or her teaching to support students learning in this digital era. not only Instagram, they can also use other sosial media for language learning such as Facebook, Twitter, or even Steemit.
Regards,
ALFYD, English Language Teacher
I think is a good development, but i wonder how effecient social media would be in in learning/teaching.
I get distracted easily when trying to study online than in the library.
The amount of ads that pop up social mefia these days is just enough to distract.
I still wonder how students would express them selves exhuastively on social media owing to the fact that some social media have a limited numbers of text for a post.
This will encourage shorthands and abbreviations which at long run causes more harm than good.
Thank you for your comment @hilltop
specifically, I used the Instagram as the media for students to submit their work. I don't use it when I teach in classroom because it is hard to avoid students distracting. The reason I used this media is to promote autonomous learning for my students.
To deal with the limited number of texts, I suggested my students to write at 3-5 paragraphs in caption column, or the students can continue their paragraphs in comment column
Looks good, I personally find Instagram a great tool. However, I've not been using it in my classes with older students. The problem is that they get distracted too easily =)
I'm glad to see that Instagram is working out for your lesson. Great job!
Thank you for appreciation @alvinauh
I believed that this social media is very popular now, I have used this media to promote autonomous learning for my students. But, an effective strategy is need to avoid students distracting. In my own way, I dont use this in my classroom, but I used outside classroom as students' projects for one week deadline. So that, they can use the long time to prepare the subject they will describe.
very useful writing...