iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Typically, each social media craze that consumes students is greeted by educators with deep wariness, if not complete revulsion and efforts to ban an app.

Think Snapchat and the now shuttered YikYak, etc., etc.

But TikTok—an app that allows users to make short, silly videos set to music—is being embraced by some schools, The New York Times reported. West Orange High School in Florida, for example, has formed a TikTok club, according to The Times. 

"WINTER GARDEN, Fla. — On the wall of a classroom that is home to the West Orange High School TikTok club, large loopy words are scrawled across a whiteboard: “Wanna be TikTok famous? Join TikTok club.”

It’s working. “There’s a lot of TikTok-famous kids at our school,” said Amanda DiCastro, who is 14 and a freshman. “Probably 20 people have gotten famous off random things.”

The school is on a quiet palm-tree-lined street in a town just outside Orlando. A hallway by the principal’s office is busy with blue plaques honoring the school’s A.P. Scholars. Its choir director, Jeffery Redding, won the 2019 Grammy Music Educator Award.

Amanda was referring to a different kind of stardom: on TikTok, a social media app where users post short funny videos, usually set to music, that is enjoying a surge in popularity among teenagers around the world and has been downloaded 1.4 billion times, according to SensorTower.

The embrace of the app at this school is mirrored on scattered campuses across the United States, where students are forming TikTok clubs to dance, sing and perform skits for the app — essentially drama clubs for the digital age, but with the potential to reach huge audiences.

And unlike other social media networks, TikTok is winning over some educators, like Michael Callahan, a teacher at West Orange, who had never heard of TikTok before the students told him about it."