Student Instagram Videos

One of the most popular choices on the remote learning choice board is the Instagram post. I purposefully made it half as much writing as the journal, because I want an excuse to get them to share! One or two have actually posted to Instagram, screenshotted, and then, of course, deleted it. Really, all they had to do, though, was insert a photo they already had–either that they took or one that included them (not a random screenshot)–and write something, ANYTHING, in 5 sentences about it! Oh, and hashtags, of course.

Think of it as semi-voluntary show-and-tell.

I have been making videos with Adobe Spark every week (I’ve rolled the TikToks into the Flipgrid part of the video rotation) with photos I just happened to have: travel, cooking, pets, etc. Those have GOT to be getting boring, kitties and puppies or no. I want to entice more students to engage with this extra practice, and how better to do it than with their peers and THEMSELVES?

Process

1. Track the choice board choices each week. I was doing this when we weren’t allowed to put grades into the online gradebook. It kinda helps me monitor trends: what needs work, what needs to go, what to switch around. I just made a list of the kids with an “I” by their names for each class, and the number of the week they submitted an “I.”

2. Open up your Classroom Google Drive folder for the class. All of these photos were sitting in separate presentations, but those presentations were all organized in weekly folders, alphabetically by student thanks to Google Classroom submission!

3. Open all of the presentations in one assignment that have IG posts. I found it helpful to have all of the presentations from Week 1 open in their own tabs so I could delete each tab as I finished copying.

4. Copy and paste photos from assignment into a Google Drawing template. Because I had them submit their “posts” on Google Slides, I can’t just save the pictures, and I can’t just copy and paste them to, say, Paint. So I made a super quick Google Drawing template that I just copy and switching out photos and captions. I made spots for 2 square photos and 2 captions, because I figured it would be easier to duplicate slides and then just slide a picture over than uploading and adjusting every single picture separately (I was right).

HINT: For the file name, use numbers indicating the class and the week submitted. For example, “Instagram Post 2.3a” for the 3rd assignment from 2nd period, and the first set of two photos from the batch.

The first 4 steps took me about 20 minutes per class.

5. Download each photo as a PNG so you can add them to Adobe Spark. PS I totally made my husband do most of this. It took him maybe 10-15 minutes for a class, tops. (I think he got distracted looking at 3D printer stuff along the way. His 40th is coming up, you know.)

6. Insert and adjust one photo per slide and copy the caption from the Google Drawing. I use the split screen layout so the caption is on one side and the photo on the other. I flip the sides each time as I scootch over to the second photo on my PNG and just have the Google Drawing up in the background to just toggle, ctrl C, ctrl V. I did find it handy to make a bunch of slides with my desired layout (1/2 as many pictures as I’d be using).

7. Record a simplified/concise/corrected version of what they had to say about the photo. I thought about just reading their captions, but I really wanted to keep this as A) beneficial and B) un-embarrassing as possible. No need to put anyone’s Spanish on the spot when I could model how EASY it is to say something WITHOUT a translator!

8. Delete all of the post except for the hashtags (adjust and/or correct those). I usually do subtitles on these Spark videos, but I think I’ll just let the hashtags they came up with speak for themselves! Unless they forgot them…in which case I am not above making them up.

9. Download and share! As always, responding to the videos I post is optional, but I like to make it both easy and tempting to respond. So all I asked were which hashtags from the video interest them most and if they recognize anyone.

Now let’s see if they like it…