Tools for Digital Scrapbooking
What is Instagram?
- Instagram is a social media site that is focused solely on pictures. You can upload and edit pictures and share them with all of your followers.
- On Instagram, you can take or upload pictures and edit them with filters.
- You can also write captions for the picture to describe what the picture is about.
- You can follow celebrities, family, friends, etc. Also, you can follow accounts that are geared towards your interests such as book lover’s accounts or fashion accounts.
- You can use hashtags to find other work that interests you or add them to your own caption in order to attract more viewers.
- Download Instagram onto your smart phone and sign up using your email, phone number, and password.
- Instagram can be used to take pictures of and create an entire digital scrapbook based on different locations that are important to the students. Once a week, there will be a place-based writing prompt and the student will have to take a picture of that place and put it on their Instagram with a short quote from their writing.
- Instagram can also be used for non-conventional book reports as a student can create an Instagram account and post from a characters point of view. For example, a student reading The Adoration of Jenna Fox could create an account for Jenna and post things that Jenna frequently talks about such as hands or skin.
This is the screen you will see if you go to Instagram.com or the Instagram app on your phone. To sign up, just click "Sign up!" toward the bottom of the page.
This is your feed. Here, you will see posts from your followers!
This is your page. Here, all of the posts you have ever made will show up in a grid format. If you click on a post, you can see the caption or any comments made to that post.
With the search feature, you can search hashtags that interest you (and trust me, there's a hashtag for everything.)
A wonderful example of how to use Instagram as a digital scrapbook! This user takes photographs of whatever book he is reading at that current time with a background that coincides with the novel in someway. This could be a great way for students to track their reading over the summer or throughout the year!
What is Pinterest?
- Pinterest is an online scrapbooking website where users can pin different photographs or links to their boards. You can search various premade categories or search for whatever you want.
- With Pinterest, you can create boards based on your interests. For example, you can have a board dedicated to food or the mountains or Harry Potter.
- You can link or post different websites in if there is something on that site that interests you.
- You can follow friends or strangers to build up your feed.
- Go to Pinterest.com and sign up using either your email, your Goole account, or your Facebook account!
- Students can create a board based on a topic from the time period the book they are reading is set in. If students are reading Eleanor and Park, they can create a board dedicated to the 80’s where they can include fashion choices, popular music at the time, or popular movies from the time. This will help students get a feel for the plot or the setting of a novel.
- Similar to an inspiration board, have students create a visual journal by posting images of how they feel that day, where they might have gone (e.g. to a museum) or anything fun or interesting they might have done (e.g. cooked a meal for the family). This journal can be shared between teacher and student with an ongoing dialogue. Students may or may not want to share their visual journals with other classmates.
This is your feed. Posts from your followers or other posts that you may be interested in can be found here!
At the top of your page, click "Explore" to discover new posts. From here, you can filter the screen to suit your preferences!
You can filter posts based on what interests you or what is relevant to your search! This is not only a great site for students, but it's also a great resource for teachers.
If you want to save a post, just click on it and press "Save" in the top right corner. It will then ask you which board you would like to save that post on so just select your board or make a new one and it will save automatically!
Here is an example of how a student could use Pinterest as a digital scrapbook! In this example, there are mainly posts about the 1980's and the fashion at the time, but there are also posts with quotes from the novel and things that interest Eleanor and Park such as the headphones and the cassette tapes. |