Instagram As A Teaching Tool ? Really ?

What is this trendy thing called Instagram that all the cool kids seem to be into? It's been around for a few years, quietly picking up traction mostly thanks to everybody's new obsession with mobile photography. Instagram is a social networking app made for sharing photos and videos from a smartphone.

The use of Instagram becomes more popular for the students nowadays. Instagram allows users to communicate, collaborate, and share resources with other people. Easy to access and easy to use make social media become a very effective tool to communicate and exchange ideas. Students may use Instagram to keep up with their friends, to stay up to-date with news and current events, to fill up spare time, to find entertaining content, and to share opinions.

As a person who personally use Instagram, I can agree that Instagram can be a platform for student to learn something such as new language. Experts mention about several activities that can be done in using Instagram for language teaching. According to Spencer (2012), there are different activities that teachers can use to implement Instagram in their classes; utilizing digital storytelling, practicing grammar on photo captions, doing photojournalism, creating photo prompts for themselves, finding metaphors within chosen photos, creating photo blogs, finding and documenting context within photos, doing an ethnographic study, sharing art, and exercising creative and artistic expression through taking their own pictures.

By doing those things, student will able to learn many languages and be more creative. Beside that, student will able to gain knowledge of people's culture as they communicate with a lot of people from around the world.

I think it can be applied in classroom because it is easy to handle and most of the student know how to use it. To make thing easier, teacher can create a school specific group or using a designated hashtag, you can share your images and videos with your community of students, teachers, and parents. For example, share pictures from graduation ceremonies, school events, field trips, and more. You can even ask your students and parents to participate by posting their own images.

This is another way for teacher to use Instagram :
1)Showcase students' work. Snap pictures of students' artwork and other special projects to share on a private Instagram account only accessible to families and others in your school community.
2)Feature a student of the week. Invite students to alternate "taking over" your classroom Instagram account and sharing photos from their daily lives. Then have the featured student share his or her photos with the class.
3)Share reading recommendations.Invite students to snap photos of their favorite books and then browse the photos in your feed for more ideas on what to read.