I will be the first to admit that my Instagram page stinks. I (try to) post a weekly blog, which I distribute mainly on Facebook and Linkedin, and I get a good response from them. But my other social accounts have not been up to par. The youth say that Facebook is for old people, and that I need to be using Instagram, or even Tiktok. After removing the knife in my heart for being considered one of the old people, I realize they have a point. A lot of “younger” people don’t use Facebook all that much, so how do I capture their attention?
Instagram is a picture and movie based social media platform. That is its appeal. Instead of long diatribes and pages and pages to read, posts contain beautiful pictures and cool videos. Plus, it’s so easy to scroll from one story to the next. Seems like I should have been using this from the start. So why wasn’t I utilizing such a good resource more? The number one reason: I couldn’t film my students. Without video or pictures I don’t really have much in the way of content on a platform like Instagram. Until now.
I discovered this pretty cool online app called Autodraw, which was developed by Google to take a very rough picture and use AI to match it to the crappy drawing that I was trying to make with what they have in their database. It took my poorly drawn pictures and created a much cleaner version that I could easily manipulate. Being so easy to use, I knew I had to use this within my lesson plan write-ups. Now I could include diagrams in the lesson plans to make them more detailed and easier to follow. It didn’t hurt that these pictures could be shared on Instagram too!
So, besides the weekly blog post you normally consume on Facebook and Linkedin, I will now add a diagram from one of my lessons on Instagram each week. Consider it a visual appetizer for Montessori Physical Education. Now you can see what some of the games look like! If you go to Instagram and search for montessoriphysicaleducation, you will find my fledgling, but slowly growing page. Hopefully you can glean some ideas for your PE class as we head into July, and before you know it August, and setup week. I digress. I hope you enjoy some pictures that I hope are worth many words to you.