Originally posted by Lori Jones on September 22, 2019
How is Tik Tok working for education? The jury is out really. There are investigations in multiple countries about the privacy of the content and data generated by this application. Tik Tok (formerly musical.ly) is a social media platform that has similarities to Insta stories, and Snapchats but finds its roots in lipsynching. Below are a few articles outlining how this application may or may not be using data and may or may not be contributing to education. Tik Tok has been downloaded close to 800 million times in the last 2 years. Is it simply its popularity that would lead it to be an educational platform or is it truly revolutionary?
Articles
As if the attention span of our youth hasn’t been shortened enough already, Tik Tok has aided it to become even shorter. Tik Tok only allows for 15 second clips but enables you to connect 4 clips together for a maximum of 1 minute. Similar to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat when they first started, it has become a popular app for students to spend hours on and get consumed by. I have one student who tells me that her morning routine involves watching Tik Tok videos for 40 minutes before coming to school!
The only benefit I could see Tik Tok having for education is that it forces users to be concise and straight to the point, otherwise they would run out of time or viewers would lose interest and skip. I think Tik Tok is a great social media app, but should be left as that, a fun app for people to show their creativity and fun side.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/18/digital-crack-cocaine-the-science-behind-tiktoks-success/#57d4c59078be