Instagr.am is fairly new to me, but not so much to many of my students. My students are testing all of this week, and I spent most of my weekend thinking about ways I could get them to do something easy over the course of the week. We’re still talking about la familia, and so far, we have:
- drafted family trees,
- used Google Voice in class to describe our families (see rubric here),
- taken a written assessment,
- talked about La familia real de España (thanks to @ZJonesSpanish),
- watched a video clip and a few commercials (thanks to @karacjacobs and her Spanish 1 website), and
- listened to a song.
Initially, the obligatory “family tree poster board project” was in the works, but I feel that we already accomplished describing our families with a Google Voice assignment. I’ve been pondering ways to incorporate Instagram — it’s just so EASY to snap a picture, add a caption, and talk about photos with your friends (or with your Spanish teacher)! On my way to work this morning, I figured my students would be excited to use Instagram as an extra credit activity, so I quickly drew up a rubric and introduced it to the group.
After locating me in the world of Instagram (@srtabarragan), students were tasked to take a minimum of 5 photos of their family members, and to add captions to each of their pictures in which they describe who’s featured in the photo and what their relationship is. We took a few pictures in class as an example and showed them on the projector. So far, it’s been a success! An INCREDIBLE amount of students have already sent in their pictures, and it’s been so much fun to have conversations with them completamente en español. Here are some examples:
Can’t wait to talk about these with my students! Can you think of any other uses for Instagr.am in the FL classroom?
Love it! I can’t wait to try this. Thanks for the examples.
Conversations still ongoing! What’s great is that they’re liking each other’s photos and communicating with each other in the TL. If only I could accomplish that in the classroom. Amazing!
Great idea! You could also assign a hash tag to the assignment (e.g. #español101), then everyone would have an easier time searching for each other’s photos.
I agree, and I wish I would have realized this before handing out assignment! Thanks for the suggestion!
Hola,
I just wanted to say I love this site!!!! It is super helpful and has so many great ideas. I just had a few questions. I love the worksheets/project guidelines that you are making, they look like they have been professionally done. I was just wondering what you are using to create them? Also, I noticed that some of your documents can be viewed through dropbox or on scribd but they don’t have the icon that allows you to download them like others do like in a word document. Just wondering if there is anyway to be able to use them as well. Keep up the great work it is truly inspiring. Que tengas un bue dia,
Abby
Hola Abby. I’m glad you’ve been able to find something useful! I create worksheets primarily with Pages for Mac, which is why most of the worksheets on this site are in easy-to-view .pdf format. I’ve been trying to provide links to MS Word versions as well, but there’s still a lot left for me to convert. I’ll work on doing this over the weekend. Let me know if I miss anything!
Thanks for stopping by.
Randomly found your blog today – it is FULL of awesome ideas. Thanks so much for posting. You’re doing a great job! Also, I am obviously not using Pages to its full potential…
Thanks for stopping by!
Do you have the assignment sheet posted on the blog?
I don’t.
The idea came to me during a morning commute to work, so I quickly wrote something down with a Sharpie on a copy paper, made copies, and never got around to typing up a rubric. Sorry!
Love the idea! Thank you very much for sharing it! And congrats for your blog. It is very useful