Instagram as a Special Educator Professional Development Tool: A Guide to Teachergram

Abstract

Instagram is a free, online social media application that facilitates social networking. Since Instagram is image dependent, educators create visuals accompanied by captions of up to 2,200 characters. By adding specific hashtags to captions, educator posts are curated by the algorithm into a broad community of practice, colloquially known as “Teachergram.” As a technology-facilitated PD tool, Teachergram lends itself to many of the characteristics of high quality and sustainable professional development (PD). In this paper, we focus on how Instagram can be used as a PD tool that supports collaboration, reflection, and feedback loops of educators. We focus on how the unique characteristics of Teachergram lead to the creation of communities and affinity spaces, aligned with existing PD frameworks, built to support the retention of special education teachers and related service providers.

Keywords

professional development inclusive education educational perspectives social networking technology perspectives

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