Using Instagram and Vine

Instagram and Vine are mobile apps that are free, easy, and fun to use.

Instagram is a very popular social media channel for teens today.  They use it to share their lives with friends through a series of pictures.   They can snap pictures with their cell phones, apply digital filters to them, and share them on a variety of social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. To make your photos even better, you can add text with an additional app.

at Animal Kingdom in Disney World

My son and his friend getting ready for prom

my kitty, Leia

from The Great Movie Ride at Disney World

Here are some examples of pictures I took using Instagram with Overgram for the text.  To use Overgram, you take the picture first, then add the text, and then get it into Instagram.

















Vine,  acquired by Twitter, is used to create and share short video clips.  And by short, I mean 6 seconds. With 6 seconds you don't have time to dally around, filming your pet while you wait for it to do something cute.  You have to anticipate its cuteness, or cause it to happen.  I sneaked up on my pig, knowing that she was asleep in her doghouse, and that it would take about 6 seconds for her to wake up and walk to me (to see if I had any food).
 You can also start and stop very easily by touching the screen with your finger and lifting it, and then touching it again. I played around with this feature using some of my students as guinea pigs. Instagram and Vine do actually have uses in the classroom. And you can believe that students will be engaged when using these apps at school!

You can set up a private Instagram account and use it to show students' work.  You can assign a student each week to take 5-10 photos which they share with the class.  The class must choose one of the pictures to use as a story-starter or writing prompt.  You could use it as a show-and-tell activity.  Students could take pictures of their family, their pets, their things, or their favorite somethings, and share them with the class.

With Vine, you could also make a show-and-tell activity as described above.  You could stage a scene from a book you are reading; of course you only have 6 seconds.  Students can actually be very creative with 6 seconds.  One of my ESL classes is reading There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom.  I am considering making a Vine of "Bradley" walking into the girls' bathroom, the girls screaming, and Bradley running out embarrassed.  I think it can be done in 6 seconds, especially with Stop and Start action.  You can also film a short sequence and have your students guess what is happening in the video.  This could be used as a writing prompt or story-starter.  They could also write about what they think happened before the part shown in the video or what they think will happen next: sequencing and/or cause-and-effect.

The possibilities are endless!