Yesterday, Snapchat released a huge update; its biggest in months.
Now, instead of just sharing snaps and clips that disappear at a moment's notice, the update lets you text inside Snapchat for the first time and once you leave a conversation, the messages disappear. The new Snapchat also lets you video call a friend at a moment's notice.
No one was more excited about the update than Snapchat's target demographic - teens. And no one could have used a warning about the huge in-app changes more than high school teachers, like Tracie Schroeder, who tweeted this out yesterday afternoon:
Business Insider reached out to Tracie Schroeder, a high school science teacher in Kansas, for some insight about how her day went.
Here was her response:
We have a seminar period in the morning and every single kid was working on downloading [the update]. Some could and some couldn't so I am guessing it wasn't an all at once thing. I don't limit phone usage during that time, so I didn't pay much attention. By the next hour, however, I think everyone had it updated.
I am pretty lenient about phone use in my class because we use phones for various things. (Most kids don't have a separate calculator, we take pictures of things we do in lab, there are some apps that we use on projects, that kind of thing.) There is always the kid that sneaks in a text or two, but as long as it isn't a distraction, I don't worry too much.
Today was the first day in a long time I actually took phones away. I have no idea what all was included in the update, but you would have thought it was crack. They seriously could not keep away from it. I even had one girl crawl under the table with her phone.
At that point I took all the phones away and we had a little reminder chat about when it was appropriate to use your phone and when it was not. Also that it was rarely appropriate to hide under the table.
For quite awhile now, kids have had a real anxiety about being separated from their phone, but today it was near panic. I am hoping by tomorrow some of the novelty will have worn off and we can get back to business.