The Hottest Chat App for Teens is Google Docs (theatlantic.com) 96
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.
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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
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We're all tired of seeing women, homosexuals, and trannies in the spotlight.
Women are 51 percent of the population. And what do you mean by spotlight? You're offended by the very mention of GLBT folks?
America was at her apex in the 1950s.
What? When there were fewer college graduates and goverment sanctioned racism?
Integrated military now and we wonder why we've not won a war since WWII.
you're complaining about racial integration?
Won a war? Which wars are you saying we have lost?
We don't even want to kill the enemy any more.
Who says? What we want to do is kill enemies without antagonizing civilians we'll want to not attack in the future.
When I was in school back in the 1970s, we celebrated the carpet bombing of Germany and the trashing of Japan.
Celebrated? I wouldn't say that, discussed as necessary evils which were then followed up by
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Notice how I didn't say "fuck them". I called the poster out on hypocrisy and ignorance And by your sarcasm and homophobia, you are probably the poster.
You want to debate, then login, coward. Its easy to be a bigot as an anonymous coward.
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Here's why: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Here's why: (Score:5, Funny)
>The students are just a lot more imaginative, creative, and innovative, and connected than the teachers.
Last year, my wife and I had to go to the principal's office to discuss how our son (grade 4) hacked the iPads to install games for all the kids to play. As it turns out, he showed his friends how to disable the WiFi so that they could play the Chrome dinosaur game. The fact that no one at the school could even understand what he'd done was pretty telling.
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Re: Here's why: (Score:2)
It's a fair assumption, they obviously can afford iPads.
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Or that their son is a 1337 hacker genius.
There's this thing we have now called the 'internet' where you can quickly look up information using a thing called 'google.'
My nephew did nearly exactly what the OP is taking about and believe me, he is no genius. Just a normal kid with access to the internet and google where real 1337 hacker geniuses post simple guides to doing all their 1337 hacker st00f.
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with access to the internet and google where real 1337 hacker geniuses post simple guides to doing all their 1337 hacker st00f.
This is why I have said for years that anyone can learn the basics of using a Linux system. Heck it's not that hard to even do a basic compile even if you're not a programmer. I'm not an IT professional or programmer and I learned how to use Linux from books and the internet when I got my first Linux system.
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My fiancé is a 6th grade math teacher. She has to constantly keep something up letting her know who is connected because students will just disconnect and play games so she can't see if they are doing anything else.
The funnest one though is when one kid was caught looking at anime porn. By another student. And called out in front of the entire class!
Of course our whole education is so screwed up now to make everyone feel special and smart and like they can't fail. Numerous times you can take a t
Ah, youth (Score:2)
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.
Not just laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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>Chromebooks are popular in schools now. And by popular, I mean with the school districts.
As the parent of a smart kids that has some struggles with ADD and executive function, I love the "cloud based" approach to assignments. He is getting better at remembering to bring things home, but having the ability to go online to see what his homework is and do things without paper really helps him.
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It's the same reason Windows Notepad is my fav "chat" application... when I log into someone else's Windows machine with Teamviewer. It isn't about students being clever (as some posts suggests), it's about finding the easiest solution to a problem. We work with what we have.
> THAT is the biggest reason why I see Google Docs as a chat application.
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Or Sheets
You can have each column as each person.
Each row as a new topic, and it supports images.
And google struggles to make GSuite Chat any good, hahah.
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Not only are chromebooks nice cheap disposable laptops, but Google apps for education provides a nice enterprise management console for dealing with them that allows for app deployment based on inherited permissions under an OU style hierarchy. Pretty handy when every department seems to have their own suite of special programs, and just dropping the device object into its folder takes care of it.
Then there's browser extensions like Securely that integrate into chrome that serves as web content filtering
Hah (Score:1)
I collaborated on a test with other students by joining a local irc server.
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I wonder if the kids couldn't just use mibbit in a Chrome tab to log into an IRC server?
Gwave (Score:4, Funny)
Why would you save it? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 ma
Re:Why would you save it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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I stand by my reasoning that Kavanaugh is not fit for the supreme (or any) court, not for anything he did prior to 2018, but because of his horrible conduct and batshit insane "defence" that he displayed in front of a senate committee.
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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.
Re: Why would you save it? (Score:3)
Kids using Google Docs are simply doing what their parents did when they were in school - pass a page around and everyone took a turn adding to the sheet.
What's old is new again.
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Not quite. That note passing had to be careful and never dominated the lesson. What is happening now is excluding the lesson and oh look, we can see exactly why students with computer do worse than students without computers and why chomebooks were poorly designed from a teching perspective. They were designed to invade schools, dominate student thinking and be easy for schools to manage and get students used to a lack of privacy, get used to opening up to big brother or sister and what ever the gender, GOO
The hottest, you say? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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>teachers that don't think like this [nytimes.com]
Jesus, H. I fit their demographic, but there's no way I would sign up to that sort of misery party. There's nothing new in tech, they just keep moving the deck chairs in ever smaller circles.
Fuck Google Docs (Score:1)
Just like being in jail, they'll find ways to talk (Score:3)
You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.
Let them chat.
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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.
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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.
Re: why not morse code? (Score:2)
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... [inverse.com]
What is old is new again (Score:1)
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
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Emoji's have UTF codes, so all you'd have to do is send the Morse code equivalent of say: Emoji Code: U+1F913 The lameness filter is getting in the way of actually posting the morse.