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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.
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.
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.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
For adults, pornography is a big driver of technology. For kids, it's about finding all kinds of new ways to communicate with and about your peers.
Chromebooks are popular in schools now. And by popular, I mean with the school districts.
Chromebooks are cheap. The district can negotiate with multiple hardware manufacturers for volume discounts. A Chromebook is easily replaced if lost, stolen or eaten. All of the student's "cloud based" course work and assignments are instantly on the new Chromebook as soon as the student logs in. The Chromebooks are easily reset -- even remotely, for the next incoming school year. With Cloud Print, students -- or faculty -- can print to various printers in the school to which they are given access. Access to everything on a Chromebook is centrally controlled once the district joins new Chromebook hardware to their Google account.
Now given the above, THAT is the biggest reason why I see Google Docs as a chat application. If everyone had Windows or Macs they could use other potential chat applications.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Individual 1 will be very disappointed.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I collaborated on a test with other students by joining a local irc server.
So they reinvented Google Wave
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So some kids found a creative workaround for communicating during class? And that qualifies as the "hottest chat app for teens," does it?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Have someone flip the power switch on the router and tell them to bring up MS Word, WordPad or even Notepad and spend 30 minutes writing a grammatically correct 4 paragraph introduction to a prospective employer arguing why you are a fit for the position**
** "Yes, you an make up all your quals, but it needs to read like a young man or woman is approaching a job as a respectable potential employee."
Sit back and watch the mayhem that ensues outside of those districts that still have parents and teachers that don't think like this:
Last week, I wrote my own chat program in go for all my mates to use at school.
You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.
Let them chat.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.
Let them chat.
Alternatively make the lessons interesting, so nobody can be bothered to chat.
We had a club in high school that operated like this. There was a user created for the club in Netware, and the club communicated with each other with Wordperfect 5.1. We'd make the filenames as to.from with 3-character abbreviated usernames. Anyone could read anything, but we generally stayed polite and out of conversations not addressed to us. It was a really rudimentary forum, but it worked pretty well for the mid- to late-90s.
Teachers got annoyed at us, so the admin put an alarm sound into the login script, so it was harder to log in and chat without them knowing.
I still have an archive I saved when I graduated, but I can't bring myself to read any of it since I'm sure it's cringy and awful.
When attendance is mandatory, it guarantees a portion of those will have no interest in learning.
Big talk from a keyboard warrior,
Likewise. You really think that your gun carrying rednecks with some rifles can stand up against airstrikes, armored vehicles, and everything else?
What would happen when the groceries stopped being delivered, or all the telecommunications were shut down, or the electrical grid go down. Or your granny can't buy her medicine at the pharmacy.
Most states besides the East and Left coasts are highly conservative.
You're forgetting the upper midwest.
Let's see... the military is a little over 1M people.
Active duty perhaps, but that doesn't include reservists or Guard now does it.
Not enough to round all us deplorables.
No need to round you up, just cut off the infrastructure. Most of you good ol boys who think you'd be a "militia" are just as dependent on your ESPN, Internet, Grocery stores, pharmacies, etc as the "coastal liberals" are. Texas is arid, cut off the AC and Monday Night Football and you braggart Texan machismo would cave in,
The left barely know how to use guns, let alone own them.
And who says liberals don't know how to use guns? That's the same old argument you southern boys pulled off in the 19th century...when a bunch of yankee "shopkeepers, clerks and factory workers" defeated a bunch of squirrel huntin illiterates duped into fighting for a bunch of slaver plutocrats with logistics, technology and MASSIVE firepower.
You obviously don't 'know' Morse code - Too much work.
All they are doing is using an approved tool in a collaborative way, exactly as their teacher showed them. That's much easier than learning "tap code" like prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton:
https://www.inverse.com/articl...
Ken
When attendance is mandatory, it guarantees a portion of those will have no interest in learning.
If attendance were not mandatory, it would guarantee that a far larger portion of the population won't learn anything at all.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
From the link:
On September 25, “Jane Doe” from Oceanside, California sent an anonymous letter to Senator Kamala Harris alleging that the then-nominee for Supreme Court and his friend raped her “several times each” in the back of a car. ...Later on October 3, Judy Munro-Leighton emailed the committee claiming to be the “Jane Doe” of the letter... ...She admitted to investigators that her story was a “tactic” and “that was just a ploy.”...
“I am not Jane Doe . . . but I did read Jane Doe’s letter..."
So... she is NOT the person who claimed that the then-nominee for Supreme Court and his friend raped her “several times each” in the back of a car.
So it's quite possible that the REAL Jane Doe was raped. It's certainly not been disproved.