Snapchat in the Classroom and Beyond

I wrote in an earlier blog post this week about a freshman orientation my office hosted recently. At this event, we decided to make our own Snapchat filter and event story. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em). We decided to create our own filter for both marketing purposes and to embrace the trends (and to maybe address the issue of students constantly looking at their phones by incorporating social media into our orientation presentations).

Our decision was similar to the points brought up in this NPR article about teachers are using Snapchat in the classroom. A psychology professor takes snaps of real life applications of what he teaches so that students can view them as they study for tests. He also records videos with narration about concepts he's teaching about in the classroom. 

In our presentations, we encouraged students take photos with each other during the event as well as pull out their phones to snap videos and photos of moments they thought provided important info and tweet with certain event hashtags (and we did the same), which we then monitored through our social media intern, who would interact with the tweets. One of the purposes of this was to allow our students and instructors abroad, as well as students who couldn't attend, view highlights of the events.

This was all an experiment this year, as we had never done anything like this before. But we were all pleasantly surprised by the results. We had a ton of students utilize the snapchat filter and add snaps to our story. We had previously added students who could not attend the event and they were able to view event highlights from our snap stories. We received a lot of positive feedback for this and are going to brainstorm and expand our social media use options next year! 

Comments

  1. innovative design coJuly 29, 2017 at 8:54 AM

    I love the risk you took with Snapchat, and that it worked! Creating a community in the classroom or at school can be challenging at times, but your use of Snapchat would allow for the community to grow outside of the brick and mortar walls.

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