Teaching English with Instagram? Why you should pay attention to microlearning with social media
Okay, teachers, let’s start this article with an undeniable truth: no matter how knowledgeable you are, no matter how motivating or qualified you are, your well-planned lessons will never be as attractive as the act of endlessly scrolling down on social media. Accepting that the B&W phrasal verb lists we send our students as homework are not as appealing as watching that so-called fun teacher on TikTok is necessary, so do yourself a favour and accept it now (if you haven’t done it yet).
Most of us know that constant scrolling can ruin our attention span and badly affect our brains in many ways. But, hey, let’s face it, an average person (aka your student) will keep spending more than 2 hours per day on social media regardless of the negative consequences this act will bring to them. So, as teachers, it’s time for us to fully understand that social platforms are here to stay and, what is even better, they can become an effective ally for our ESL lessons.
Microlearning with social media is the new black
Thanks to the easy-to-manage tools currently available online, many language teachers have become digital influencers, sharing daily chunks of educational content that are meant to be short and engaging. Scroll down your Instagram feed right now and you will certainly bump into someone teaching “other ways to say Thank You” or “most common phrasal verbs with the preposition UP”. And although it can be irritating to see unqualified teachers taking over social media, we must also admit that some of them create quality content that can really help our students to improve their English.
Microlearning deals with these bite-sized educational assets that are usually less than an hour or even a few minutes/seconds long. The term microlearning is based on Hermann Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (“The Economics of Human Resources”, 1963) that suggests that splitting content into small pieces helps people engage with the content and improves knowledge retention. So here you are! What can be better than a 20-second long reel on Instagram to teach your student “5 ways to say I´m sorry”? Or better than having the “ED endings” pronunciation explained on YouTube by a nice guy that is constantly joking?
So the point here is: stop looking at social media as a distractor, a waste of time, a way to get away from homework that your students use, and start using social platforms in your favour! Not only will your students feel more engaged, but it will also show them you are plugged into technology and are willing to use all possible tools to instil the love of languages in them. Microlearning is a thing and, let’s be honest, we all learn better when the information is delivered to us in a curious, interesting or unexpected way.
10 fresh ideas for activities using social media
If you are still unsure about the efficiency of microlearning with social media and don’t know how to incorporate microlearning activities in your teaching, here you have 10 fresh ideas to use as homework for your students:
- Ask students to look for a specific hashtag (example: #phrasalverbs) on Instagram and to watch about 5 videos that come up, taking notes of the most interesting ones.
- Send your students short videos of YouTuber teachers from different countries explaining the same grammar topic and ask students to compare the different accents.
- Ask students to analyse the lyrics of one or more songs that are trending on TikTok (and learn the choreography, why not?)
- Ask your students to look for #englishpuns or #englishmemes and take notes of the new vocabulary
- Make students choose a short video of a teacher they like on Instagram and tell them to stop the video and repeat what they hear many times, until the pronunciation/intonation gets perfect
- Encourage students to listen and actively participate in other teachers´ lives on Instagram/YouTube
- Ask them to describe (in writing) an Instagram photo of their favourite celebrity and compare it with a photo of their least favourite celebrity.
- Ask them to choose one of their own photos (Instagram or Facebook) and tell you everything about the day the photo was taken (was it a celebration? etc)
- Encourage students to take photos of things related to the vocabulary learnt in class (for example photos of food after learning adjectives to describe food).
- Ask students to gather some famous quotes about life, wisdom etc and to try to use some of them as captions for their photos.
The possible activities are endless, just let your creativity flow and try to put yourself in your students’ shoes. Would this activity help me learn some specific words? Would this help me understand a grammar feature in an engaging way?, are some of the questions you should ask yourself before assigning students activities related to social media.
Real cases, real teaching
If you still cannot see yourself using social media as a way to microteach chunks of content, let me give you a real example. Some teachers may have come across advanced learners that still have fossilised errors, such as saying “It’s depend of” instead of the correct version “it depends on”. Having noticed this common mistake and having tried to correct learners over and over again for many years with no success, I decided to create the following post on Instagram:
Every time I had a student making this mistake, I would send them this Instagram post and they would laugh and joke about it. Not surprisingly, they would correct themselves every time they made this same mistake in class until assimilating the right form of the sentence. Happy students, happy teachers.
So accepting social media as an ally made my life as a teacher easier in many ways. After all, “If you cannot beat them, join them”! So why not give it a try!?
Ps: some students have no social media, so make sure you adapt the activities to them when teaching groups. You can ask them to use random photos from Google/magazines, pair them with a student that has social media or think of any other creative solution to avoid them feeling bad or excluded.
By Mary
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