We just finished our conversation with @IDEM_in_English 🙂 My students were interested to discover that they are at a boarding school in Montpellier. We tweeted in French and @freddav’s students tweeted back in English.
Here are the logistics (from our end):
*I moderated student tweets using our class account (@rvhfrancais1) and the hashtag #rvhsidem.
*I displayed the twitter feed on my computer connected to the smartboard so that students could see what was being tweeted.
*My students used the class set of iPod touches to submit their tweets to me using this form.
*Their responses showed up in a nice, organized spreadsheet.
*Using my second computer (not connected to the smartboard), I copied and pasted their tweets with their name and the hashtag into twitter. This worked really well and allowed my students to take ownership of their tweets (they loved it when the French students responded directly to them). I was able to add their tweets quickly and I didn’t have to do a lot of typing. If i noticed that students were making mistakes, I talked to them about it. If we they wanted to respond to a tweet but didn’t know how to in French, I helped them find the words. We did tweet some in English since they’ve only been learning French for 5 weeks.
*Before the conversation started, I set up a Twapper Keeper so that our hashtag was archived. This will be helpful in the future so that we can go back and see what happened in our first conversation!
My students not only were able to communicate in French with students in France, they were also able to learn about their culture. I hope we’ll be able to collaborate again so that both groups of students will be able to grow 🙂
Update: We even made the news in France!
te(a)ch french 
Great job! I am so happy it worked for you! Looks like a lot of learning going on! What a great concept to help the students with their French.
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I was on the other end (I’m the French teacher, hi!), it was indeed great and highly motivating, we’ve renewed the exprience yesterday, even greater than I thought it would be . I love Lissa Layman’s idea of the google form to filter the tweets. I did that yesterday, and it greatly helped. Isn’t it great when technology helps you discover how other people work and what it can bring to you? I’m soooo pleased to be part of this new collaboration. So, thank you Lissa for the opportunity of these sessions and for the ideas that improve my work life! Hopefully, I can bring something to your working life too one day! 🙂
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