User:Ozacha1/sandbox

Rough Draft
With the rise of use of mobile cell phones in school, applications for these cellphones have been created to support this. As of February 2018, 80,000 applications were available for teacher use. A variety of messaging apps provide communication for student to student relationships as well as teacher to student. Some popular apps for both student, teacher, and parent use are ClassDojo, and Remind. This accounts for the 72% of iTunes’ top selling education apps are for preschoolers and elementary school students. Apps like Remind and ClassDojo offer many different abilities such as language translation, scheduled reminders, and parent messages.

ClassDojo is one of the Apps that is used widely throughout schools. According to crunchbase.com, it is a “means to encourage learning, skill development and character building among students”. The app offers a platform for teachers to share pictures, videos, and reports with parents and administrators. The Remind App is another way for teachers to communicate with parents and administration. The App allows for teachers to send out scheduled text messages to parents, and also provides a class blog for the teacher to update with upcoming due dates, tests/quizzes, and other class information. WhatsApp is different from the other apps because it provides communication for students to other students. The app offers group chats, video messaging, video class, and photo messaging. Another app that allows students to communicate is GroupMe. GroupMe allows students to communicate in a group chat, while also only using WiFi instead of cellular data. Some college-aged students use this app for sharing course information.

Technology in schools is becoming a common practice throughout many grades and age levels. The creation messaging applications helps support this boom of usage in schools. This new technology comes with both pros and cons. A pro of messaging apps is their easiness in use and accessibility to student, teachers, and parents. A con, is that not all students and parents have this technology available to them. This can cause a gap in students who have cellphones and computers and those who do not. Another con is the ease in sharing of information can lead to academic dishonesty. This is a policy colleges are cracking down on.

As the kinks of messaging applications become smoothed out over time, the future of them lies ahead. There is hope that they become more advanced, specifically when using them for help via a bot. Advancement in this field will allow for higher frequency of use, more emotional connection, and higher convenience for users.