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Think there’s no need for sepia-toned filters and hashtags in your classroom? Don’t write off the world of #selfies just yet.

Instagram is one of the most popular social media channels among generation Z, or those born after 1995 and don’t know a world without the Internet. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this is a generation of visual learners and communicators, where sharing your life-from the food you’re about to eat to your thoughts about anything and everything-is a part of your everyday routine. So, why allow Instagram in your classroom?

For starters, preparing students to be college and career ready involves helping them build their digital literacy skills on a professional level, and Instagram is a technological tool that offers educators innovative ways to motivate and engage students, opening up a new platform for collaboration, research, and discussion. Secondly, we all know the importance of interest and ownership for getting students excited about learning, and since your students probably already love Instagram you’ve already won half the battle.

Teacher/Classroom Instagram Accounts

Create a private classroom Instagram account that you control and can use to connect with your students, their parents and guardians, and other grade team members. Invite them to follow your account and catch a glimpse of your everyday classroom moments and adventures.

1. Student of the Week: Each week, feature a different student on the class Instagram account, posting photos-with their permission- of their favorite classroom projects and other examples of their hard work and achievement. This is a fun opportunity to highlight your students’ individual strengths, positively reinforcing their behavior and progress.
2. Daily/Weekly Classroom Update: Similar to student of the week, you can instagram your students’ classroom projects and activities on a daily or weekly basis. From photos of new classroom reads to capturing field trip memories, this is an excellent way to build a sense of community while allowing parents to see what lessons, topics, and exciting activities are happening in your classroom. This is also a great way to easily and quickly share your classroom ideas with other grade team teachers.
3. Student takeover: If you’re not able to encourage students to create their own individual Instagram accounts, invite each student to “take over” the classroom account for a day or week by sharing photos from his or her everyday life. This is a great opportunity for students to learn more about their peers by instagramming their interests, hobbies, routines, and even cultural traditions.
4. Photo Inspiration: Finding inspiration to write can be one of the most difficult parts of the writing process. Spark your students’ imaginations and help them discover new ideas through instagramming writing prompts by playing with different angles, perspectives, and filters to capture random moments and objects that you encounter throughout your day-to-day.
5. Caption That! For a variation of the writing prompt, post an interesting photo and ask your students to write a descriptive caption in the comments. Differentiate how challenging this task is by asking students to write their caption using specific sentence types, different parts of speech, clauses, prepositional phrases, and their current vocabulary words.
6. Daily challenges: If your students are able to follow the classroom Instagram account on a regular basis, you can use it to post daily challenges in the form of visual word problems, review questions, and bonus questions. Instagram photos of important learned concepts and pose questions to your students in the caption, asking them to write their answers in the comments. For example, this fifth-grade teacher used Instagram to review who Henry Ford was and other important events in history.

Student Instagram Accounts

Asking your students to follow the classroom Instagram account with their personal accounts is one, highly unlikely, and two, probably not the best idea. What you can do is ask your students to create additional Instagram accounts that would only be used for school or classroom purposes. You know how LinkedIn is your professional Facebook? A similar idea applies here.

1. A Day in the Life: Challenge students to assume the role of a fictional literary character and share images that he or she believes the specific character would post, highlighting the character’s interests, personality traits, and development throughout the story. The 15-second video option is a great way to really let students get into character through recorded role-playing and even performance reenactments. These activities can also be applied to important figures in history, such as the creator of Honda, Soichiro Honda, or jazz musician, Melba Liston.
2. What the Kids are Reading: Students can snap photos of their favorite reads and write a brief 1-5 sentence review in the caption. To take it a step further, ask them to record 15-second long persuasive book trailers to hook their peers. Boost further discussion among your students by asking them to comment on other book reviews and book trailer videos to share their opinions. Tip: Encourage your students to use a unique #hashtag (ex.: #SMSGrade4Reads) for each book review posted, and by the end of the year you will have a visual library of all of the books your class has read.
3. Math Hunt: “Why do we have to learn this?” “I won’t need this in my everyday life.” Sound familiar? Help your students see the real-world math applications all around them by sending them on a hunt to document or illustrate their knowledge of different math concepts:

• Geometry: lines (parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting), angles (right, acute, obtuse, etc.) symmetry, and three-dimensional shapes (prisms, cubes, cylinders, etc.)
• Everyday fractions and arrays
• Concepts of money
• Examples of volume vs. mass, area vs. perimeter

4. STEM Research: Students can watch, observe, and record science experiment data and results over time by documenting any step-by-step process with photo and video narration of learned science concepts. Outside of the lab, students can use their Instagram accounts for observing science in nature or sharing their own scientific findings. What makes this special is how quickly and easily students can share and revisit their visual references and recorded data.

• Physical & chemical changes
• Weather patterns and phases of the moon
• Animal adaptations
• Habitats in nature

Note: Instagram, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Snapchat, has a minimum age limit of 13 to open an account, but according to Instagram’s parents’ guide, there are many younger users on Instagram with their parents’ permission since you don’t have to specify your age. Always check with your school’s administrator and obtain parental permission before sharing photos of students or their work.

Know of any other interesting ways to use Instagram or other social media sites in the classroom? Already using Instagram in the classroom? Let us know in the comments!

Veronica has a degree from Mount Saint Mary College and joined LEE & LOW in the fall of 2014. She has a background in education and holds a New York State childhood education (1-6) and students with disabilities (1-6) certification. When she’s not wandering around New York City, you can find her hiking with her dog Milo in her hometown in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Growing up in the Midwest during the 50’s and 60’s took less effort than it does today, or that’s how it seems from my perspective.

I wouldn’t be a teen today for any amount of money. My friends and I had greater freedoms then; greater responsibilities as well, I suppose, especially those of us who lived in the country. I can only speak from that perspective since I didn’t have the “townie” frame of reference.

We country kids grew up with a different sense of the world. Take hunting and fishing, for example. Most of our dads did both. Sometimes Moms helped out in that hunter-gatherer pursuit. I know mine did.

When I was in elementary school, it seemed that Dad went fishing every weekend. There are family photos that show some of his catches; catfish, bass, crappie, and others. Much of the time his preference was catfish. He and a few of his friends would spend the weekends at the river or large creeks in the county and they’d fish. We had a freezer full of fish at all times.

Perhaps this explains why the smell of catfish makes me wretch; over-exposure at an early age.

Hunting worked much the same way. Dad took me squirrel hunting when I was about six. He gave up that idea because I couldn’t see well enough to avoid pit-falls, small twigs in my path, and other noise-makers. I also could never see the prey in the trees. My participation, therefore, was pointless. I would never be Diana on the hunt.

Bless his heart; he just couldn’t give up hope for me. When I was about eight, he stood me outside, facing the door to the shed, on which was tacked a homemade target. In his hands was a .22 caliber short-stock rifle. Thus began my instruction in the use of firearms. I practiced until he was satisfied that I could consistently hit the target and then the bulls-eye. As soon as I accomplished that, I didn’t have to do it anymore.

Of course, he wasn’t serious about me using a rifle to go hunting. I don’t have a memory of his taking me rabbit hunting, for instance. I would succeed with that only when the prey stood still, giving me a clear field for a heart shot. I doubt that would have ever happened.

At age thirteen, I received my introduction to archery. By my own reckoning, I did well enough. I don’t remember losing too many arrows. My brother took his training with me. He’d completed and passed his other trials with flying colors and went on to hunt very successfully with his own bow and arrows. I never hunted that kind of prey.

During those early years Dad taught me all sorts of skills, most of which I can’t remember now unless conditions are absolutely perfect. He delivered regular dissertations on local flora identification with explanations of purpose, leaves, bark (if any), resident fauna, and other lessons.

Along the way, brother and I learned how the climate affected our small part o

“The way you talk about the [digital divide] changes people’s view of who is responsible for resolving it…. This issue has been around for years, but its meaning is in constant flux and is manipulated by political agendas.”

I’ve switched some of the tools I use for keeping current over the past few months. I’m finding that I use RSS less and less for keeping up on blogs and rely more on Twitter lists and searches to sort of keep my hand in. I also read a lot of print material still [some of my best "things to think about" things are still coming from the pages of Library Journal and Computers in Libraries magazines] and am trying to keep to my book-a-week plan for 2011. Oddly I also get news from seemingly random places like other people’s facebook walls and I made a little image-milkshake over on a site called MLKSHK. You might like it.

I have a standing search for “digital divide” on Twitter that just auto-updates itself onto my desktop via TweetDeck. The thing that is so interesting about this, to me, is how often the term gets used and for how many different things. This morning there are discussions about the digital divide and gender, how the EU is trying to narrow the digital divide (referring to access to broadband) and a report about how switching to online social services in the UK would adversely affect people who are digitally divided already, mostly talking about seniors.

Which leads me to the paper I read recently which was really pretty intersting and on topic: Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide? Public Perceptions and Policy Implications (pdf) It’s not long, you can read it, but the upshot is that depending how we define the digital divide, we will develop different strategies to “solve” the problem. This is not just hypothesized in the paper but addressed scientifically. So if the problem is lack of compturs, we throw computers at the problem. If the problem is broadband, we work on network infrastructure. If the problem is education we design sites like DigitalLiteracy.gov and then wonder why a website isn’t teaching people how to use computers. Tricky stuff, endlessly fascinating, thorny problem.

If you haven’t already read the February 2011 issue of The Writer Magazine, I highly recommending grabbing a copy of it and absorbing it from front to back. Not only does the reader learn about the latest contest winner and get to read a super-interesting new story, but there are also several lessons in writing that will hold their footing anywhere.

A profile that will grab your attention and hold it for as long as you have memory is one written by Bob Blaisdell. He writes about a little recognized writer by the name of Jorge Luis Borges.

This man who had almost no vision is described as “a thoroughly literary being” and from the examples given of his talent, I’d have to agree. He did things with words and concepts that I’ve never seen before. And now that I’ve seen those examples, I’ll never look at my writing the same way again. His one piece of advice for writers was “Let your imagination out to play.”

Though he’s gone now his writings and his examples will live on to inspire and instruct those who’ve come after. Be sure to study Borges’s technique as revealed in Blaisdell’s profile of this little-known author.

Mark Wagstaff’s prize-winning story is showcased along with a great little biography of the writer. The magazine also chose to annotate with the contest judge’s evaluation and reasons for choosing this story as the winner. This read shows much of what a current editor might be looking for in submissions in the way of style, tautness of structure, etc. There’s a lot packed into less than 2000 words here.

Literary fiction author, Charles Baxter does an interview with Luke Reynolds. Baxter talks about how writers need to remain true to their stories and the characters who live within them. Reynolds calls Baxter one of the contemporary masters of literary fiction. That’s a title hard to come by today. If you want to see how a modern literary author, with stories made into movies, thinks and works, this should be a can’t-miss interview for you.

Stephen Delaney takes the reader into the mind of the character by showing how to use the character’s thoughts to help tell important parts of the story as well as unveil character backstory, personality traits, physicality, etc. without having to use narrative in the usual way. His point is to show how to create the drama of a piece by using those thoughts. This was a great instruction piece and well worth holding on to, regardless of the genre involved in one’s writing.

There are more interviews, more instruction pieces, and oodles of extras that The Writer is so good at laying at the feet of writers. And if you can’t get your hands on the physical magazine, drop onto the website at: www.WriterMag.com/

Peruse the website and enjoy all the goodies available there. Sign up to get updates, if you wish. They come in handy.

And in case anyone wonders if this is advertising for the mag, I can tell you that they don’t need me to spread the word about their offerings. I just wanted to clue in those who don’t already subscribe or visit the site as to what they’re missing. This month’s issue is an especially good one. At least, for me it was.

Next time I’ll deal with another subject. Have a magnificent week, all. Until you drop in again, a bientot.

Claudsy

What makes a good children's book? I'd suppose that's a tough question to answer, otherwise Microsoft would have already written Newbery Notebook 1.0 and Caldecott Creator for Windows. A good children's book is far from formulaic.

• It may help you understand why some books win with children while others fail. The list explains, for example, why a common literary motif of many children's novels (Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies, Narnia, Holes) is the removal of the protagonist (and other main characters) from adult supervision and control.
• The individual attributes may help you create some connections between otherwise unrelated texts. One successful exercise with every novel, for example, is looking at how a character grows or changes over time. I've used this approach with Number the Stars, Because of Winn Dixie, Crash, Flipped, and Island of the Blue Dolphins to name just a few. Check out this sample recording sheet.
• The list can be used a fairly accurate indicator of a book's overall value when teachers must choose just two or three titles for study. Many teachers, for example, complain that their boys just don't "get into" books which fe
  1 Comments on What Makes a Good Children's Book?, last added: 1/2/2010
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  Theresa Milstein said, on 1/2/2010 10:56:00 AM
  

  I like your list of book. As an assistant, I ran reading groups over a number of years, and found that a strong character that males or females could relate to was more important than the sex of the character. I read, Because of Winn Dixie to a mixed group, and all got into it. But a book like, Princess Academy would only work with a girls' group because of the subject matter.

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Meet Nathan Fowkes. He’s teaching a painting workshop today in Pasadena. It’s sold out, but there’s still time to sign up for another session in December.

I found his work via google reader’s automated suggestions, which I’ve now learned not to ignore.

Posted by Adam Koford on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: blog, classes, Drawing, instruction, painting

“Once upon a time, young people helped senior citizens across the street. While this is still a good idea, it’s just as important to help them setup their Facebook page.”

This short article makes a few points very well. Many novice tech users are experts in other things and get easily frustrated feeling like they’re back at square one. That sort of thing needs to be considered when you’re figuring out the best way to approach teaching topics. Additionally, find ways for people to succeed, whatever their level of skill is. This can be a challenge for people who are really brand new, but just having simple taks like mouse proficency and “send an email to me. Oh look there it is” can give peopel the confidence they need to explore on their own. [thanks barbara]