I keep the Mexico trending topics as a column on my Tweetdeck, because you never know what will come up there. One great thing about Twitter is that you can only get so complicated in 140 characters, and when a topic like #4palabrasqueduelen gets trending by thousands and thousands of people, the text gets even simpler.
So of course I had to mine the tweets using Archivist Desktop, clean them up, and use them for class. This is authentic input, mostly simple phrases written by Spanish speakers for Spanish speakers, most of them about our students’ age or just a bit older. Twitter is such a gold mine!
And I can’t do something like this without sharing, right? I put them in a spreadsheet, took out the hashtags, fixed the accents that got messed up in the transfer, deleted the trash, and deleted the repeats like the unending versions of “ya no te quiero.” (Twitter is so dramatic.) I also only kept 50 of them – the program mined 2000 tweets.
After your students read them, take a poll of what are the favorites. Then see what are their #4palabrasqueduelen – o mejor, #4palabrasquealegran, a great suggestion from @SraHeebsh.
Photo credit: Scott Beale
