You can increase social engagement in your course with social media. While this post focuses on embedding Instagram images into your content, here are some ideas for using Instagram in your classroom.

Adding an Instagram Image

Here are steps you need to take to get your Instagram images on your blog post, like this one:

Guess where we are?

A post shared by Stan Skrabut (@sskrabut) on Mar 26, 2017 at 4:59pm PDT

1. Take an image and post it on Instagram.
2. On a computer, go to https://www.instagram.com/ and log into your account.
3. Click on the profile icon in the upper right corner. This will take you to your collection of images.
4. Click on an Instagram image.
5. Next, click on the three dots in the lower right corner.
6. Select the Embed link.
7. Click on the Copy Embed Code button.
8. Switch to your Blackboard content page in edit mode and choose the HTML representation of your post.
9. Position your cursor where you would like the image to be placed and paste in the code, and click on the Update button.

That is all there is to adding an Instagram image to your Blackboard site.

Adding an Instagram Widget

You can increase engagement in your class by assigning Instagram as an activity. You would need to instruct your learners to post Instagram images with a specific hashtag for the class. Here is an example of what you could insert into your Blackboard course:

Here are the steps:

Note: To use this widget in Blackboard, you will need to upgrade the widget. It costs $10.

1. Go to the site https://lightwidget.com/
2. Complete the form. You can either use your username or a hashtag.
   
3. Highlight and copy the code for the widget.
   
4. Switch to your Blackboard content page in edit mode and choose the HTML representation of your post.
5. Position your cursor where you would like the image to be placed and paste in the code, and click on the Update button.

Once you are done embedding content into your course, test it with a student view.

Naturally, if you have questions, please give the TEI team a shout. We would love to help you out. What do you think of this hack?

Stan Skrabut, Ed.D.

Stan is Director of Technology-Enhanced Instruction. He has over 20 years experience working as an instructional technologist and trainer. He has a master’s degree in computing technology in education and a doctorate in education specializing in instructional technology.