TikTok in Classrooms

Every year, TikTok gets bigger and bigger for students. TikTok is a very popular app for students and is known for its short-form videos that you scroll. Teachers noticed and wondered if they should use short-form video platforms. Some teachers are siding with it and some teachers are going against it.  Last month, a debate was organized by Opentodebate.org between an educational influencer and chemistry teacher named Phil Cook and Adrian Dingle, a secondary school teacher and educational consultant.

One reason why Phil Cook is for it is because he believes micro learning is a good thing. Microlearning is watching shorter videos instead of longer videos. He believes it is a good way that we should start using to learn more often. Micro learning is helpful because it's what kids are more used to now. An example of this is watching other people doing experiments that are dangerous for younger kids in the classroom. Some of these include fire and explosiveness experiments that are not good to imitate. You can also rewatch the experiment since it's a video and it's much harder for you to redo it in school since usually there's only enough supplies to do it once.

Against TikTok and short-form learning is Adrian, and he thinks it's too shallow for education, it's too basic, and it doesn’t allow the kids to do the experiment themselves. Learning must be serious and kids must be engaged in the topic instead of scrolling on TikTok. He also states that it’s the kids' faults if they don’t pay attention in class. I disagree with this because teachers sometimes have boring or fun lessons planned for the day, and that isn’t the kids' fault. Something else that was stated was that a student sometimes doesn’t want to learn or doesn’t learn anything, so there's no point in using TikTok. Lastly, he said that kids will act differently on TikTok. They will get distracted and start doomscrolling and not do any work.

But Phil also says some interesting stuff supporting it. He wants his students to use the material they learned and put it on TikTok. After they learn the stuff, they use the information and are able to make a video teaching other people about it. They can show the videos to other people such as teachers and family members.

Adrian then wonders if it's worth it to use TikTok if it removes time from learning chemistry. TikTok is also not interactive and learning needs to be interactive and humans need to be in the mix of everything. He's also wondering why we have to use TikTok and not any other app. He wonders why we have to use addictive short-form videos instead of long and more informative videos.  Some kids also want to just learn and not do projects.

In my opinion, Phil is correct. Micro learning is a good thing and we can do experiments safely by watching professionals do the experiments. On the other side, TikTok is not serious and kids will just start doom scrolling and not pay attention. Kids may find out a way to doom scroll without the teachers knowing and not be on task.

I want to have TikTok in classrooms. Even though I support this, I am sure this will not happen at all. I think it's pretty obvious that adults and parents want their kids off of it as much as possible. 

Overall, people are split on whether they want to keep or remove TikTok. I think keeping it would be nice, but it's not going to happen.