Incorporating Instagram Selfies in the Classroom

I was intrigued at the prospect of using Instagram in the classroom for educational purposes. I currently have a teacherInstagram account where I post activities that we do, field trip memories and German related images. Instagram is one of my students’ favorite social media sites, and as I am always look for ways to meaningfully engage students in the technology age, I think this will be the perfect fit.

Instagram is a social media platform where users can capture, edit and share photos with friends and family. It is easy to use and wildly popular with the teenage population. The project, created byRachel Sabre, has the focus of using Instagram selfies to teach and practice reflexive verbs and also the past tense in French. In her unit, she completes a variety of activities prior to having students create their selfies, such as examining famous self-portraits from the French-speaking world and having students engage in conversations regarding their opinions surrounding selfies.

When I teach reflexive verbs in German 2, I often have students describe their daily routine using PhotoStory. I am getting really bored with PhotoStory, and am always looking for new ways to engage students through different tools. Instagram would be a creative solution to this conundrum. Keeping this current project in mind, I would tweak it by using Instagram, and perhaps incorporating the past tense as a great spiraling review tool for the course. I would also include the hashtag in German requirement, as I believe students would really enjoy that. Instead of 20 pictures, I would require 10. Additionally, I would require students to screenshot their selfies (including required comments) and place them into a  tool like Adobe Spark Page to create a Storyboard that is easy to grade and easy to follow. As a last step, having students place these Pages in a class Padlet would give students the opportunity to see each other’s final product in a linear fashion and even comment on the projects as a whole, instead of picture by picture.

Incorporating Instagram in the classroom could be challenging, but Ms. Sabre provides solutions to common hurdles, including having students create alternative school-based Instagram accounts, and having all students follow each other and the teacher in one class period. She even suggest alternative project guidelines for students who wish not to or are not allowed (by their parents) to use Instagram. In such cases, students may create selfies using images and simply present the requirements using a presentational format of their choice (GoogleSlides, Adobe Spark, Prezi, etc.).

I believe that this project would be engaging and worthwhile in the classroom, as students will be able to access their project via Instagram for many years to come and likely reflect upon it fondly.