Thing 3

10 Ways To Use Instagram In Your Classroom

The ideas historical figures and literary characters is awesome.  I am not currently working in Social Studies, but the ELA classes would be an awesome place to use this.  We are currently reading The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the students struggle with character mapping.  Setting up an Instagram from Bruno would be amazing.  So far the kids have only read a few chapters but the main character describes his house and town in Berlin, then he describes the new place he moves to.  I picture kids developing an Instagram showing different images he describes.  Then they would have ownership and have to create #tags to show understanding of relevance.

Instagram for Teachers

As I read through this section I came to a different conclusion than the author was talking about.  The article discussed sharing Instagram between teachers, I thought what about sharing with parents.  It would be like Dojo but it automatically pings your phone (I am guessing because I do not have Instagram…YET).  I would be so excited if I had the app and my daughter, who is going into Kindergarten, teacher had Instagram to share photos.  For instance when teachers go back to set up their classrooms, like the author says, they are proud so they want to share.  How much stress of going to a new place could be relieved if a teacher instagrammed the classroom to parents to show their kids? It would provide some sort of familiarity for that first day.  They could share selfies and pics of the staff and around the school all to give the kids an idea of what they are walking into. 

Also, the teacher could share student work, bulletin boards and even upcoming assignments or due dates.  That is something I have run into a lot.  Parents say they didn’t know about projects or test dates, etc.. Teachers could be sending these out this way as a compliment to all the other ways they post this important information.

My problem with this idea is learning how to use Instagram.