my use of instagram as a middle school science teacher

I am a former middle school science teacher and maintaining a connection with students was always a priority with me. I made a personal Instagram account around 2010-2011. It mostly consisted of photos of food or artsy stuff (I was really into the arts once upon a time). 

I knew my middle schoolers were into Instagram and it was their main social media. In my second year, I thought it would be cool to create a teacher Instagram account to highlight the cool experiments we were doing in class and make announcements/reminders. I recall having many dilemmas and questions about how I would run this teacher account:

  • Should the account be private or public? 
  • Do I want just my students to follow it or do I want anyone in the public following me?
  • How do I take photos of the activities/labs without showing student faces?
  • How will I handle communication from students via this teacher account?
  • What will be the content of this account?
  • Do I want to follow my students back and see their private lives? 
I ended up going with the choices below:
  • I made my account private and never included faces of students for privacy reasons. I know parents filled out forms at the beginning of the school year letting us know whether they wanted photos of their children taken and made public. A few selected no. Because I never received that list from my admin, I decided making my Instagram account private and not including their faces in the photos was a safe route to take.
  • Whenever students DMed me or asked a question through a comment, I always directed them to my school email.
  • This account's content was strictly science topics, sharing class activities/labs, posting hw and test reminders, and sharing school-wide events.
  • I allowed students to follow me but never followed them back because I wanted to be kept out of the loop from their private lives. I knew them as my students and they shared bits and pieces of their lives with me. However, as someone who used social media since middle school...I know many share a side of them (their online persona) through social media that their parents aren't even aware of. I didn't want to know this side either (lol).
It was fun to have the teaching account! I used it to share cool science photos and videos. I don't remember the log in credentials but I wish I could. It would be cool to know where my old students are now. My oldest students are now 19-20 year olds...time passes by so quickly!

I am sure social media was very useful during the pandemic, especially when schools were shut down. One thing I truly missed when we all went to distance learning was the face-to-face interaction with students that I didn't get through distance learning. Greenhow and Chapman (2020) discuss the positive potential of social media in education and how it can be used to connect educators and learners and build communities while considering the challenges to implementing these technologies: commercialization, privacy and norms. 

Did you use social media for educational purposes as an instructor? How did you navigate through the privacy concerns that may arise?

Reference

Greenhow, & Chapman, A. (2020). Social distancing meet social media: digital tools for connecting students, teachers, and citizens in an emergency. Information and Learning Science, 121(5/6), 341–352. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2020-0134

Comments

  1. DaeunJune 19, 2023 at 8:47 PM

    Thank you for sharing! I really enjoyed reading about the concerns you had at first about using Instagram for your class, the decision making process, etc. I wonder how the survey results about student photos were used by the admins if they were not shared with the teachers.
    To share a little bit of my experience... I've taught an undergraduate level course, and one semester some students asked my instagram account after the semester ended and we followed back each other. My Instagram feed was empty, so I didn't really have concerns, and it was fun and nice to see my past students' personal lives. But I think in k-12 settings there will be a lot more complexities...

    ReplyDelete
  2. VanessaJune 20, 2023 at 4:14 PM

    Thank you for sharing this example. I think it's really great to hear how a teacher authentically used the technology.

    ReplyDelete

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