Your Semester Hashtag Activity

####magicteaching#coolactivities#motivated students#positiveresults#lerningtounlearn######

 Many of our students love this symble nowadays, so....why not thinking of a cool ativity to incorporate it to our class. Reflecting upon it, I thought of an activity but before the procedures let's look into some facts about the origin of hash tags. I confess I was taken aback!! I got it from urbandictionary.com:

"Hashtags are believed to have originated on Twitter but, interestingly enough, it is not a Twitter function. Some believe it began when the broken plane luckily landed in the Hudson River in early 2009, some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it. I have no idea who this person was, but somebody else would have read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to HIS tweet. For something like this, where tweets would have been flying fast and furiously, it wouldn't have taken long for this hash tag to go viral and suddenly thousands of people posting about it would have added it to their tweets as well. Then, if you wanted info on the situation, you could do a search on "#flight1549" and see everything that people had written about it."

Suggested activity and procedures:

1) First of all, to introduce the topic, I would have my students discussing about their beliefs regarding the origin of hash tags to see of any of them know about the facts.

2) After I would ask them to carry on a research on the internet to know about the facts.

3) Later on, I would ask them to take a picture (they're free to use their creativity), which would represent their expectations for the semester. Then they would create the hashtag for the picture.

4) As students finish creating their hashtags, I would ask them to vote for the most creative one. As an alternative prodecedure, if students have a group on facebook, the teacher can ask them to upload their pictures and there can be a votation online. This way they can show their pictures and hashtags to families and friends! ;)

For more interesting info on the topic you can also check these two links:

http://pt.wix.com/blog/2013/11/o-que-sao-hashtags/

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag

http://top-hashtags.com/instagram/

The Word of the Year Quiz

Every year the Oxford Dictionaries announce the word of the year. So, the new SELFIE is VAPE which was the word chosen for its significant use in 2014.

To explore this set of words that are year after year incorporated to the English language, I found this quiz (link below). There teachers can have students enriching their vocabulary and also practicing  these new items by asking students to role play situations where they have to use a given number of words. Very good activity for advanced and upper-intermediate students!

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/11/word-of-the-year-2014-quiz/

Let's now wait for the word of 2015!!!!