In my personal life, I am guilty of using Instagram frequently. I enjoy spending time looking at other people’s pictures and sharing my own experiences through this particular form of media because I think it showcases my personal thoughts and style. While most people do not think of Instagram as an educational tool, I believe otherwise. Upon further inspection, Instagram has unique characteristics that could be useful in teaching certain types of content matter, and I believe that students would be excited and motivated to learn using Instagram.

Since I am specializing in social studies education, I started to think about ways to apply Instagram to teaching history. With Instagram, you have the option of tagging a location for pictures, and you can click on this location to see what other people’s pictures from the same location. It would be interesting to look at a particular location—like a monument or a site of a battle from the Civil War—and see different photos people have taken there as a supplement to the content students are learning. The students could also take pictures on their own time that relate to history (perhaps at historical locations or of artifacts that they encounter) and share them with the rest of the class. This would offer a pleasant change from traditional learning and engage students in visual representations of the material.

Instagram could also be incorporated in the classroom through a hands-on interaction by the students themselves. Each student could create an account specifically for the class, and as he or she is studying outside of class, they could post pictures or facts they learn that relate to the material. With these posts, they could use a hashtag that indicates that it is related to the class so that other students can find these posts. For instance, if we were studying the Revolutionary War and students found supplemental information in an article they read outside of class, they could snap a picture of this article and post it on Instagram to share the knowledge with other students. By getting students to engage with the content in a new way, many of them could become more interested and engaged with history.

I found an interesting article entitled “10 Surprising Ways to Use Instagram in the Classroom” (http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2014/08/07/10-ways-to-use-instagram-in-the-classroom) that has other ideas about incorporating Instagram. For instance, a teacher could use Instagram to capture field trip memories or document student progress over the year. My favorite suggestion from this article is to have the students imagine how a famous or historical person would use Instagram by browsing historical photos and selecting certain ones. I believe all of these methods would capture the attention of students and make the content much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of inappropriate descriptions and pictures on Instagram that would not be appropriate for school. If Instagram were to be used in the classroom, the pictures would have to be pre-screened for appropriateness. This is why having students create accounts specifically for the class would be useful in eliminating some (but probably not all) of this inappropriate content.

I think using Instagram, especially with having students post their own pictures that relate to the content, can encourage student creativity and individuality. By editing their own pictures and making unique descriptions, students can showcase their individual style within an academic setting that portrays their preferred learning methods in a unique way.