The Selfie

On her visit to Argentina, Mathilde Verillaud -English Language Fellow for the US Embassy- came to explain what a selfie is and why we should apply it in the classroom. The meeting took place at Alicana's school and the  "selfie-expert" started her talk by explaining that it was a tool of the new generation which would help students learn about themselves. Besides, it would enable teachers to connect to their students by facilitating this self-discovery process and speaking their visual language. She also shared with us all the materials that her students had produced with her, and at the same time we could appreciate how a "simple selfie activity" would boost students' motivation. Some of the activities mentioned were: higher order ranking questions, gallery walk, description games and the one that I liked the most, 'Every photo tells a story', where the students picked one photo, then wrote about the person in it and passed it to his/her classmate on the left. After that, the students wrote a quote about the person in the photo that had been passed to him/her and passed it to his/her left. Eventually, the students wrote a paragraph about the photo that he or she had in front of them knowing that both quotes were to be included into the narrative.

This photo of Mathilde and me, which you may think is a 'selfie', is actually known as 'usie'. This is the name given to a 'selfie' that includes more than one person (or a 'group selfie').
More information about 'usies' is available for you in this article.
Taking it a little further, please visit this very interesting article about the 'selfie', more specifically the suffix '-fie'.