Snapchat In My Classroom

Snapchat My Students!?

     While I was scrolling down the articles regarding social media in the classroom, I stopped when I saw the heading Getting Started with Snapchat in Your Classroom. The reason that I stopped at this article is because I never really thought of using Snapchat with my students. While I realize that social media is important for teachers to have in order to communicate with their students and parents I always thought that Snapchat was not an appropriate tool to use in education. Snapchat is known for being for private conversations and posting/sending selfies.

        In this article by John Walter written in 2017 starts by saying Snapchat is the most popular social media for teens which by today's standards wouldn't apply because TikTok has taken over the most popular social media platform. The article goes on to describe five ways and reasons to incorporate Snapchat in the classroom. Snapchat can work as one way communication to remind students of an upcoming assignment. Snapchat can be used to share interesting information or real-world examples that apply to class content. Snapchat can also be used to draw and annotate text on the fly. Snapchat can be used as a study session to share the top ten pieces of information about upcoming tests. And finally Snapchat can be used for professional development to communicate and learn from other educators.

        Going back to using Snapchat to Draw and Annotate the article included a segment regarding the use of this platform for this.Tara Martin, who uses Snapchat to annotate and reflect on text that she is reading. Tara uses snapchat to motivate her students to read by using the various emojis offered on snapchat. I provided an example of her snapchat picture that she sends her students. 

                                                        Image Source: Tamaramartin.com

                                                                

                                                                      My Takeaway

        This article was very interesting and an eye opener into a social media platform I had not considered appropriate in the classroom. I am still unsure about using Snapchat myself to communicate with my students but I would definitely incorporate TikTok into my classroom which I feel would be more effective in today's world. As teachers we need to use the platforms that our students are using in order to reach them better. 15 years ago Facebook would've been the place to use for this but that is no longer the case. As I mentioned before 3 years ago Snapchat might've been  the place to go but it's 2020 and the place now is TikTok but as we know this will most likely change in the next 3 years as well with new platforms coming out all the time. This would go far now with remote learning so students are motivated by seeing their teacher put effort in communicating with them in various ways besides just google classrooms.