Is Your Assessment #Instaworty?

insta worthy

When a picture is good enough to be posted on Instagram

1. Do you like this picture? Oh yeah, totally insta worthy!

-From Urban Dictionary

In a presentation I attended at ISTE, Kasey Bell focused on students publishing for real world audiences. As I near the point of completion on my master’s project work, I’ve been thinking about that session. While I will be using the product of my work in my classroom this fall, the nearly 100 hours of work I have spent putting the project together will culminate in a presentation to one person. The only person who will hear me speak to my work will be my academic advisor. Thinking on that, I realize how this is a direct reflection on many of the assessments students complete in my classroom. These assessments are presented to an audience of one or one confined to the walls of the classroom.

Think about anytime you’ve finished an exam. Were you feeling a sense of relief because it was done or a sense of accomplishment because you shared the results of the work you’ve done? In my schooling experience, finishing an assessment ended with a sense of relief because I had just regurgitate everything I had learned onto a Scantron or bluebook. There was no pride in constructing a document that would have any relevance beyond a grade exchange with an instructor.

It’s a hard truth and a cycle that we need to begin to break. There is great power in hitting that publish button to make your work public for the world. I just think about the feeling before I hit publish on a blog post. There are those butterflies in my stomach before clicking that button. How can we create that same experience for our learners and the assessments they create?

We are really looking at two aspects here: 1) Creating works that can be shared with a public audience 2) Sharing these works with audiences of interest. I want to keep this post super simple and just start thinking about the easiest ways to think about the first thing, making a publishable assessment product.

What would happen if we asked students to share out their work on summative assessments? Just imagine students taking pictures of their answers to test questions and posting them to Instagram. Think about that for a moment. How would you feel if you had a student post their work on an assessment to Instagram? Would you consider it cheating because it would just be a picture of a test and it’s answers that any student could replicate? Would it be a something that audiences would understand? Could someone learn something about the subject or the learner’s voice from this post?

Is your assessment #instaworthy?

For my graduate project, I will be using a short slide show presentation in an online conference to present my work. We can have students do the same with their work, but the presentation would still be a closed loop between student and teacher. An option I began giving students a few years ago was making screencasts in lieu of a face to face presentation. In the screencast, the student can walk through the presentation by providing audio narration. In some screencasting apps, students can have their face appear in the corner of the screen or provide live annotations to the slides as they present. I recorded myself giving my presentation as a way to practice what I was going to speak to. When recording myself, I couldn’t just fake it and think that I knew what I was saying. 

I don’t expect anyone to watch this as it is a fairly specific topic: Next Generation Science Standards and the process of designing curricular units for the classroom. It's also over 45 minutes long. But the ability to publish the screencast video to YouTube will allow any interested parties to view it. The fact that I knew it was going to be published made me correct some errors that I made rather than just telling myself, it’ll be fine when I do it “for real.” This version will live on past 8/20/18 (the day of my presentation). Who knows, it may even get 2 views, That would be more than my actual presentation.




The ability to screencast can be easily done in the classroom from a smartphone, tablet, desktop, chromebook, or laptop. We’ve used a few different screencasting apps. They have different features and some do require subscriptions, but most allow for some free use. Here are some that we have used:

• Screencastify: An easy to use app that is used in Google Chrome. It works great since we are 1:1 with Chromebooks. This is one that I personally use the most.
• Explain Everything: An app we purchased for our class iPads (this was 5 years ago.) The app has changed a bit and there are subscriptions available for Chromebooks. Students love it because there are lots of great annotation and drawing tools. 
• QuickTime Player: Some of our students have macbooks so they can use this macos app to record their screens and capture audio narration.
• Screen Recording in iOS: many of our students have iPhones and iOS 11 allow them to do screen recordings that save to the camera roll
• Screencast-O-matic: Another screencast app that is widely praised in EdTech circles, but I have yet to use. 

Check out this post from Richard Byrne to see a detailed comparison of different screencasting tools.

Screencasting is just a first step to creating assessments that students could publish to a global audience. It is a small step from taking a presentation students give in front of class to one which can be shared beyond the classroom walls. Again, I recommend checking out Kasey’s presentation for some other great ideas.

But, if you publish it will anyone view it? That used to be a great fear of mine. It was something that held me back from blogging more. It’s one thing to publish a work to a larger audience, but will anyone ever view it? I’m not an expert on this piece so I won’t pretend to be. I have a lot to learn about YouTube in terms of adding tags and descriptions to make videos more visible in searches. But, isn’t that a skill we should all have? This is where leveraging social media becomes key. My hope this year is to do a better job of sharing the screencasts students create, even if it is just with parents. But, I think it would be pretty amazing to ask students to share their products with audiences that may be interested using social media. I plan on digging into Jennifer Casa-Todd’s book and podcast Social LEADia to help me with more ideas!

As a part of my students’ final exam, they curate their work into a portfolio of artifacts. Looking back at their portfolios, it’s clear that some assessments students complete are more audience friendly. I hope I can keep pushing myself to allow for these #instaworthy opportunities in my classroom.