Thursday, May 30, 2013

Snapchat

Because of proposed budget cuts, our seniors graduated about 3 weeks early this year.  This means that of the 5 classes I teach, 2 are now completely devoid of students and 1 has only 2 students, both juniors, in it.  Final exams for the remaining 2 classes start tomorrow.

The 2 juniors mentioned above took their final exam with the seniors a couple weeks ago so I've had them doing various miscellany--like, for example, "piloting" a new review sheet that I created based on the results of the final exams!  But today we were just talking, and one of them said she was going to send a "snapchat".

What's snapchat? I asked.
It's an app.  You send a picture, the recipient views it, and then the picture disappears.

What is the only purpose of this app?  It's as clear to me as the nose on my face--this app was created so people could send nudie pictures of themselves without having to worry about having the picture forwarded to others!  So-called sexting is not unheard of at our school and that's what came to mind.

When I mentioned that to the students, the one replied with horror that she'd never even thought of that!  Of course I believe her, but I also believe that I'm not the first to divine that particular use of that phone app.

And in case you're wondering, NO, I haven't downloaded it.  :-)

2 comments:

Scott McCall said...

My students and I have it. I hate when they leave a mess, so when my students leave their stuff everywhere I hide their stuff, send a snap chat with a short sentence description on where I hid their stuff, and have the snapshot expire one or two seconds after they open it. So they barely have enough time to view photo and read description before it expires.

They've stopped leaving their stuff everywhere, and my office has become much cleaner in the past few weeks.

maxutils said...

Except that whoever you send the sext to? Can save it. It's no different than any other photo.