Of all the apps that we use on our phones, Instagram has became one of the most famous and popular. If you were to ask people on the street which media apps they have, a majority will say they have Instagram downloaded, although they may not post as often as others. While many use it for fun, to share funny videos or pictures with friends, many teachers are trying to find a way to bring it into the classroom. In her post Distance Learning on Insta: Using Instagram Posts & Stories to Co-create and Share Student Ideas, Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada talks about Instagram’s use in the classroom.
Here I share how I used Instagram as a replacement for slideshows and more traditional Moodle posts, allowing students to engage aesthetically and analytically with course materials in ways that felt personal and accessible.-Maldonado-Estrada
From the beginning, Maldonado shows the main goal of this post, to show how Instagram can be a replacement for traditional school medias. The main use of Instagram came from COVID-19, and the shutdown of schools. This of course completely changed the manner of schooling, with the beginning of the digital school age.
My brilliant colleague, Ambre Dromgoole, a PhD Candidate at Yale, had tweeted a few days prior about using Instagram Live in lieu of other lecture-delivery platforms,I loved the idea of using Instagram and floated it by my students.
To Maldonado, who was preparing to teach a “Catholic in the Americas” class, this was gonna be a great way to test the use of Instagram with the class. Maldonado traditionally would show a slideshow full of costumes, skulls, bones, church interiors and other such catholic relics. She went on to talk to her class about how Catholics are “Extremely Online” in the forms of social media.
To get the class involved, Maldonado had everyone make a new Instagram they would use just for class. Each week students would post a “Virtual Provocation”, a post which would reflect on something that would interest students on the days reading, such as what stood out to them and if they could make their own personal connections.
For this kind of assignment, fewer guidelines helped the students find their own voice and style. K students, creative, curious, independent thinkers that they are, rose to the challenge and I was delighted with how thoughtful their posts were.
Students would not only find text to write about, but also an image to go along with it. This was to create a personal connection with the post as many times people would post pictures with their families. Students would also end up creating memes, as well as creating aesthetic posts which are popular in our time. Overall, the experiment went very well for Maldonado and her students and it brought a new unique way of using digital media in the classroom.
