This semester, I started out the first unit in all of my French classes with a totally new way of doing homework. It mainly stemmed from the fact that I’ve been struggling with homework in my teaching here because a.) I still really haven’t figured out how to grade hundreds of weekly assignments and give meaningful feedback in a way that still allows me to experience some semblance of a life outside of work, and b.) many students were not able to keep up with their assignments in French for whatever reason and were sabotaging their grades during the first semester.

So this winter, I devised a weekly project that allows students to submit homework via a medium that they’re already using on a daily basis: Instagram. I crafted a series of rules and criteria to follow in order for us to create our own network within the social media site, offering weekly assignments students were to post about, as well as an accompanying Google Form to give me suggestions for future assignments, report what they learned each week (in terms of content and what new nuggets of information they learned from their fellow classmates), and practice new French vocabulary or grammar covered each week. Further, I created my own French account to provide students with comprehensible input in the target language and models for what they could publish each week. I also wanted to give myself the experience of being a student alongside them each week. Feel free to check out my page (as well the students’ comments) here!

My ground rules for this project were to be kind and supportive of one another, to only use French, and not to use a translator (I strongly encouraged my students to make mistakes on their sites). They were to post three times a week outside of class, and periodically in class when activities called for it.

I’ll be honest: I was expecting every one of my students to be totally onboard right from the get-go. It can sometimes be a struggle to get kids off of social media, so I expected this to be a hit… but that wasn’t necessarily the case. That said, it did take some students a week or two to warm up to the idea, and some flat out didn’t enjoy it at all, but I quickly noticed higher homework completion rates over the past month and a half than I’d seen the entire first semester and that was encouraging to observe.

The project also completely surprised me in a different way: some of the students really have taken to this activity. They posted more than the minimum requirements week in and week out. They were being really kind and encouraging to one another. They were learning more about me as a person and I was learning more about them in such a short period of time. They were posting pictures of their classmates in other classes (sorry if they interrupted a chem lab or math problem to share it on their French Instagram pages…). They were sharing their pages with other students who aren’t in my French classes and only interacting with those students in French, or jokingly asking then “en français s’il vous plaît” when those students posted on their pages in English. Students in different periods and different classes followed one another. I also provided students with links to French-speaking celebrities (politicians, athletes, actors, singers, bloggers, etc.) and students interacted with native speakers and learned real-world vocabulary from scrolling through their feeds!

I did run into a few hiccups when three sets of parents notified me that they didn’t want their child on social media, when a student lost his device, and when a student broke his phone and couldn’t use it to record video. For those rare instances, I had the students submit their videos, pictures, and sentences through Google Docs in Schoology. I worry they didn’t get the full experience of the other students, but they were still able to contribute and check in on my page from the web browser version of Instagram to get the same input as their classmates.

In terms of my time management and grading, I felt like this was an extremely simple way to neatly organize a portfolio of student work for the entire unit. I created one giant Google Spreadsheet with links to each of the students’ pages internally. When students did research or poster projects, I had them record videos and submit them to their IG pages. I used student videos as comprehension exercises in class (instead of the same boring two actors my book uses). I asked students to make commercials. Students had to tag one another and ask each other questions (and then respond to anyone who’d asked them questions – just as I did when three students tagged me and asked me questions). And because I pretty much always have my phone on me, I could check in on their feeds throughout the day and comment back on student posts, giving them nearly real-time feedback on their work. I graded their posts once a week in PowerSchool based off a completion rubric I made.

The most amazing and meaningful thing I’ve taken away from this project is how quickly I got to learn about my students. My daily classroom interactions seem more meaningful and connected than they felt in the past. Last semester, a student might make a comment about their interests in class, but I would soon forget because my brain is like a Chrome browser with a million tabs open. However, after seeing a post of a student brushing her horse, and when she mentioned she liked horses in class, I remembered the post and immediately asked her more specific questions about her horse in French. In that moment, she knew that I had read her post, that I remembered it, and that I genuinely wanted to know more about her life.

On the other hand, the students also got to learn a lot more about me as a person. They now know all my pets (and husband) by name and they ask me how they’re doing periodically, they know my favorite French singers, the movies I like, and what kind of food I enjoy eating. Since they were all so brave and open in trying out this new project and in sharing personal details with me and their classmates during the month (they sang, played instruments, juggled, spoke for an entire minute in uninterrupted French, vlogged, introduced me to their friends and family, posted jokes to French-speaking celebrities, and so much more) I also put myself in a vulnerable position in solidarity and posted a video of me singing for them in French!

Since finishing this first unit on Tuesday, I’ve begun collecting student surveys and their overall thoughts on the project that I will share in a future post. I already know that this project has its ups and downs, so along with student feedback, I am beginning to make modifications for our next unit of study. Oh, and in two weeks I am attending a conference workshop with another French teacher who’s successfully integrated Instagram into his classroom experience. More to come soon!