First, I am going to say that I work with some amazingly clever people. Tom Woodward’s and William Berry’s blog posts on Historical Selfies spurred my interest on this project. My only road block was they made their Historical Selfies with Photo Shop. Since our school MacBooks do not have this, I pulled out the closest program we have: ActivInspire. I made this Instagram Template today for teachers and students to use. Here are some directions on how you can implement this into your classroom seamlessly.
Directions:
1. Change all the text boxes for the names, location, likes, comments, and hashtags.
(This one can be tricky–especially if their comment is a little long. I had to add an extra text box, so I could get “speech!” on the second line of my example)
2. Drag in a picture for the background and resize to fill the box
3. Drag in the picture of the person
4. Use the point-to-point camera tool to cut out the body/head.
(You’ll probably have show them how to use this tool.)
5. Delete the original pic of the person and resize the newly created head and place on top of background
6. Instead of saving the flipchart, teach the students how to take a screenshot (Apple+Shift+4). On a student computer it will drop the screenshot in Documents–>Screenshots. Drag the screenshot from that folder to their student folder.
Update:
I think Tom Woodward is actually a machine. He just shared this great website with me: http://histagrams.com/. History depicted as Instagrams. Love this one about Betsy Ross and Ben Franklin!
After making the template, here’s my first Historical Selfie: (Yes, Robert E. Lee probably wouldn’t have “liked” this selfie, but the students need to know about him. Ha!)
