Immigration
Our assigned topic for one day of class was immigration. On this day the provided activities mostly consisted of the students discussing black-and-white pictures of immigrants entering the US and various Spanish-speaking countries. Instead I decided to use SpinTX so that the students could talk about immigration that would hopefully be easier for them to relate to. I searched for inmi* in order to find all videos in which the Spanish word inmigración was explicitly mentioned. I then narrowed down the search to only videos that contained the present subjunctive since that was the grammar topic we were covering in conjunction with immigration. I then selected the six videos that I thought would work best and assigned one to each of the six groups in my class. I prepared a separate Google Form for each group with the link to their specific video.
On the day of class I gave the students the links to the forms for their groups and then gave them half an hour to prepare 5 questions for their classmates to answer while watching the videos. During their preparation time I walked around and heard several very good conversations going on about the videos and immigration. After all the groups were ready we watched the videos as a class with the questions displayed next to them. The students seemed very interested in the videos and in trying to answer the questions. Having taught this class before using the activities provided in the textbook, I can say that this time with SpinTX the class went much better! In the sense that the students were more interested, more active, and there was much better discussion.