The Hottest Chat App for Teens is Google Docs (theatlantic.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers' backs. Teens told me they use Google Docs to chat just about any time they need to put their phone away but know their friends will be on computers. Sometimes they'll use the service's live chat function, which doesn't open by default, and which many teachers don't even know exists. Or, they'll take advantage of the fact that Google allows users to highlight certain phrases or words, then comment on them via a pop-up box on the right side: They'll clone a teacher's shared Google document, then chat in the comments, so it appears to the causal viewer that they're just making notes on the lesson plan. If a teacher approaches to take a closer look, they can click the "Resolve" button and the entire thread will disappear.

If the project isn't a collaborative one, kids will just create a shared document where they'll chat line by line in what looks like a paragraph of text. "People will just make a new page and talk in different fonts so you know who is who," Skyler said. "I had one really good friend and we were in different homerooms. So, we'd email each other a doc and would just chat about whatever was going on." At the end of class, they just delete a doc or resolve all the comments. Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.

Comments

Here's why:

[CaptainDork]

There's no lack of equity in the tools that any of the teachers, students, or indeed, any of us have.

Teachers don't have a mainframe and students dumb terminals.

No, instead we have CaptainDork's Corollary: "For every motherfucker out there with a computer, there's another motherfucker out there with a computer."

In an essentially P2P architecture, it's a level playing field.

The students are just a lot more imaginative, creative, and innovative, and connected than the teachers.

Because the student population is larger than the teacher headcount, simple math predicts that the students are more capable.

Why would you save it?

[SuperKendall]

Rarely does anyone save them the way previous generations may have stored away paper notes from friends.

Kids aren't stupid. They see people almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school.

Under such circumstances, would the natural inclination not be to go totally dark? To leave no permanent record of your existence to critique, so that at any time you could conform to the current popular GroupThink?? No wonder SnapChat is also so popular.

The only mistake they are making I would say, is in trusting Google to actually delete something... but Google has the tools they need - for the moment.

Re:Why would you save it?

[Mark of the North]

They see people almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school.

Whoa! That must be some super thick syrupy Kool-Aid you are drinking there.

The reason justice Kavanaugh was taken to task, was not that he had a beer, it is that he lied about his conduct, which included heavy drinking and mistreatment of female students.

The recent admissions scandal story makes a nice addendum to justice Kavanaugh's appointment.

Re:Why would you save it?

[lgw]

I think this is the biggest generational flip between the Millennials and the Digital Natives: their attitude towards privacy. Here's hoping that the kids also grow up not caring at all about social media outrage and snowflake sensitivity.

The hottest, you say?

[chispito]

So some kids found a creative workaround for communicating during class? And that qualifies as the "hottest chat app for teens," does it?