Snapchat. Yes, snapchat!

I have had been using Twitter in the classroom for diverse activities for pretty much a while.  Among these ones, I usually send out a question and students tweet their answers.  First tweet gets the prize. It has always proven to be pretty engaging and students love it.  Of course, you can also use some other quizzing apps such as Socrative or Exitticket.  However I find Twitter a bit more engaging due to its social aspect.

So it all happened during a Physics class.  The topic was temperature conversions.  Since I knew that most students were good at temperature conversion from past courses I thought of this class as a review.  So I planned to use Twitter contest.  I sent out a temperature reading and they would convert it to another unit.  To avoid them cheating and using Google search to get an automatic answer I had them solve the problem on paper and take a snapshot of the process and tweet it.  We kicked off but we encountered a problem.  For some reason, two of the teams were having issues with their mobile Twitter (I only allow them to use handhelds for this particular activity since a PC or Mac server might send tweets faster than a mobile and some of my students have handhelds only.).  Their tweets were not sending out so the game was a bit uneven.  After three trials we realized it was not going to work.