Building media literacy in a classroom starts with the teacher. Before considering the pros and cons, the teacher needs to get to know the outlets available in technology and media to select which one they’d use for students to be able to relate and connect to. I want to focus on social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because they share similar features. It’s a popular outlet that students and adults are familiar with. As adults, we use social media to network, create an image for ourselves, to update our friends on our current events, and to get our point across using nothing other than memes. With that said, I think students can also use these social apps in the same way but with the objective of learning a second language, we just need to make that clear to them and monitor their use of it. Some of the pros I foresee with using social media in a foreign language classroom is that students will be exposed to real comments, tweets, and posts in the target language, they can find new ways to express themselves, and it could motivate them to participate or keep them interested in the lesson since they can connect to a device or app that they may already use. A con I think educators may encounter, if they use this approach, is if the social apps will be used negatively, as in, will this be an open opportunity for a student to get bullied? This thought came up because one of the biggest topics concerning social media is cyberbullying. As educators we need to remind students that they are given the privilege to use social  media apps in class, but if used inappropriately that privilege will get taken away. We want to model media literacy as something fun and useful, so we must model a kind ethical use of social media: what is and is not allowed.

            I would use all three social apps because they all share similar tools. First, they all have a language setting, so you can ask the students to change the language of the app to the target language. It’s a way for students to get used to the language, it may become second nature to them knowing how to navigate the app. The apps also share the translation tool, you can encourage students to read comments on a post, and if they’re not sure of a few words they can click the translate button. A downside to this is that it may become tiresome monitoring each student to make sure they’re not using that tool every second. Another way to implement social media in the classroom is using the target language for a specific purpose, we can do this through hashtags. For example, let’s say your objective for students is to be able to express their feelings or opinions on brands that aren’t animal cruelty free. They can look up the hashtag “#AnimalCruelty #AnimalCreultyFree” and see what posts come up and analyze how people write about that topic. A con to this is that we need to monitor what hashtags students look up, they should stay on task and not consider this activity as free time.

            Lastly, students can use the apps to communicate with each other using memes! I love this part because I truly believe we practice this every day. For example, instead of having a conversation through tweets, texts, comments, or posts, what we do is communicate through memes (images with a funny/clever caption). When I say that I mean send a different meme back and forth with someone. This definitely needs to be monitored because a meme conversation has to make sense like an oral conversation, we need to make sure students don’t send random memes to each other just because it’s funny, it should relate to the same topic. Although I find using social media apps in the classroom as an effective learning process and convenient, since most of us have it downloaded in our devices, educators must get to know the privacy settings, always keep the objective clear, and monitor the students.