Harnessing the Popularity of Instagram in History Class

Last week, I asked students to take to Instagram to demonstrate their understanding of the Great Depression. When they arrived in class on the due date, students opened their homework and walked around the room to look at their classmates’ assignments. They scrutinized each other’s Great Depression Instagram Projects wondering the significance of a number, date, account name or hashtag. I told my students that they’d vote for the most creative project to earn the coveted title “best-in-class” and a spot on the bulletin board in the back of the classroom.

This project transcended multiple disciplines forcing students to creatively answer the prompt applying a variety of knowledge and skills. They learned a new piece of technology, they studied the Great Depression, and they had to tell a story with a platform they use daily.

With a photoshop Instagram template I received from the founder of histograms.com, students could manipulate all aspects of an Instagram post. I taught them photoshop so they could build this project. Then, I asked them to tell a story. They were asked to envision themselves in the 1930s and detail their own troubles, or to make up their own character or scene that proved they understood the challenges facing people during the Great Depression. Students could use an original image (like the one below), they could take one offline, or they could create their own meme!

My students proved their understanding of the Depression by including the date, a location, a career that a character held, the troubles he/she faced, and the social and political events that we covered in class. Students referenced: The Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, Hoover and Rugged Individualism, FDR and the New Deal, the Bonus Army, Hoovervilles, bread lines, you name it.

While students manipulated photoshop displaying their knowledge of the history, they also exercised their creativity in making their post tell a story. Each project had to have a protagonist, conflict and resolution, or lack thereof (often lackthereof given the unit).

Finally, but most importantly, I built creativity into the rubric for the project. Essentially, I told my students that the ability to think creatively will be helpful throughout their lives.

Because students had to present these projects to their fellow classmates, they felt social pressure to avoid taking the easy route--for instance, pasting Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother into the template with a hashtag about the dust bowl. Instead, students compared and contrasted images, they produced multiple images, they took original photos, and they added onto the template in creative ways to include more information or more images.

When students finished perusing their classmates work, they voted on the best one. This exercise reinforced my push for students to be creative, try something new, build, share and critique. The three winners are going up on the back wall to inspire others when I get to introduce the next class project.