How Instagram Is Changing Our School's Clubs and Activities

If you’re on Instagram, there’s a good chance you follow or have been recommended to follow one of our school’s many Instagram accounts. It's a new, popular trend for our clubs, sports, activities and more. Many of these instagram accounts have been around for quite some time, but recently, they have begun to grow in number. Why is this, you ask? Perhaps it's related to Covid and the absence of the Activities Fair in the year 2020. Maybe it relates to the increase of social media users in general. These Instagram accounts are a smart way to convince students to get involved in school activities. Not only this, but they also help unite students. Now, students can receive updates on their clubs, keep up to date with meetings they've missed, and get a chance to represent their activities for potential members.

Instagram is a creative way to show people what these clubs and activities have been up to. This way, people who are interested in joining can check out their Instagram account before making a definitive decision. This provides an opportunity for students to see what the club looks like in action and allows them to explore their options between our school's many clubs. This may seem unnecessary now that the Activities Fair is once again up and running, but it is quite the opposite. During the Activities Fair, club leaders have around 30 seconds to truly capture someone’s interest. They often cannot go into full detail or describe the many activities the club includes. This is where Instagram becomes useful: the platform provides a new, informative way to look into a club and have one’s questions answered before making a full commitment. This is a helpful alternative because in the past clubs exclusively used Google Classroom, making a full commitment before one knew what to expect. This was inconvenient because Google Classroom was a platform in which students must sign up to access club details.

However, the complete reliance of clubs on Instagram poses some problems. Some students who don’t have Instagram or aren’t active on social media may miss important information like when clubs meet, what their plans are or what they’ve missed at the past meetings. This puts those students at a disadvantage. They have less insight on club activities and are unable to be notified of schedule changes.

But how can we solve this problem? Instead of heavily relying on Instagram, clubs should only use Instagram to show the inner workings of their club, clips for activities that they perform, and to post reminders for club meetings. Instagram could also serve as a way to invite new members without pressure. Those who may not have Instagram can access important information through technology like Remind or Google Classroom.

Though club meetings are shifting from Google Meets to in-person meetings, it is still difficult to get back into the groove of what once was normal after many of the previous club members and leaders have graduated. But clubs posting photos and videos on Instagram of their meetings and events have strengthened the community among current members, helping ease this problem. Instagram makes it easier to feel connected to other members of these clubs, ultimately bringing them together. It’s really nice to see that there are ways to feel a sense of belonging in a club even when we all can't be together as much as before.