Austin, TX – For the longest time, people have been trying to figure out the fastest and easiest way to connect with each other. Now there is an app called GroupMe! This is a communication app, where you can create “groups” / group chats with the topic of anything. This app was first created in May of the year 2010 and is still being used now. Ever since the Covid year of 2019, schools have moved from papers to laptops. Students went from going to school to staying at home. Since then, education has changed. More schools have allowed students to use their devices to submit assignments and work on studies through the internet. With education allowing this, it created an environment where students are glued to their devices. This problem comes with its strengths and weaknesses. At first, teachers believed that this was an good because the process to grade around 400 students papers/tests, now they’ve realized that their students have been spending too much time on their devices. According to the statistics, the average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone every day. An average person is more likely to use their phone to communicate with others through many different apps. Learning this, education has used this to their advantage. Now, teachers have been making group chats with their class to communicate to each other about the topics in the class, using GroupMe. This app now has about 10.75 million users. Recently, GroupMe has spread throughout the world for many purposes. Though there are many people who use this app, its main users are individuals in education. Instead of emailing students, teachers moved to texting them through the app because they’re most likely to respond. Not only is this a faster way of communicating but, this app makes students feel more comfortable to talk to teachers about the things they need. Lastly, the only problem left is the real communication. Will students and people actually use this app to talk to others and expand their knowledge? Or will they just ignore along with everything else/apps they have?

Written by: Emma Hoang