Instagram - the most popular ELT tool for teens and tweens

Lately, all the teenagers seem to be highly active and addicted to the social networking app called Instagram. It is so popular that it tops the app store most popular chat all the time. In view of the prevalent photos and videos sharing community, teachers can integrate Instagram in ELT and interact with students' updates to get them interested in English and practice more with the unique format of Instagram. So English teachers who are interested in bringing a refreshing experience to their students by using Instagram in ELT, I will tell you more about how to make good use of the "InstaFever" as an ELT tool.

What is Instagram?

It is a social networking app for sharing videos and photos from a smartphone. Users have their own profile and will receive news feed of the users they have followed. They can set their account to be public or private which means only the approved subscribers can see their new posts.

Users have to upload either a photo or a video together with some texts in order to create a new post. The limit of each video is 15 seconds whereas there is no word limit. 

WebQuest - A new way of self-learning

In this Internet era, all students can get access to all sorts of information easily. It leads teachers to think about how to make use of this channel to help students learn. That's how all sorts of self-learning research and projects that students have to do begin. Yet for most of the time, students will just directly copy what they found on the Internet. So at the end of the day, they cannot learn anything and have no awareness about the importance of intellectual property. WebQuest can solve this problem yet serving the purpose of having students to think critically and synthesis their own arguments.

So what is WebQuest?

WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most of or all of the information that learners work with come from the web. Rather than simply presenting establish facts, a WebQuest starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios, in which students have to identify and research issues and questions to develop their knowledge or solutions. Most of the time, teachers will provide some useful links in a WebQuest to assist students with their research.