By adding images and embedding videos, kids can make it into a repository for jokes, memes, photos, and more. Google Docs for Kids: A DIY social media platformĪ blank Google Doc can also become more than just a chatroom. So in short, is Google Docs safe for kids? Not really. In other cases, kids create private, digital “burn books” and invite others to contribute while leaving out the teased child. They work in tandem to write mean or hurtful things in a shared Google Doc. While parents may think their child is deep into a history paper, they may actually just be chatting with friends.Ī few weeks ago, we discussed how rampant cyberbullying is with today’s kids, and how it’s different from the schoolyard bullying parents may remember.Īt Bark, we’ve seen more than 60,000 cases of kids ganging up on other children in Google Docs. Classroom chats in Google Docs can then pick up right where they left off when kids get home. Schools often block stand-alone chatrooms and social media platforms with a firewall, and students know that websites for school work can’t be blocked. Kids have turned to chatting in Google Docs in class out of necessity. How do kids tell who’s who? Little avatars in the corner show who else is viewing the document, with assigned profile colors that match that user’s cursor. You can invite as many people to join the conversation as you want, and everyone can contribute in real time. When you share it with a friend, however, it becomes one large text conversation. When one person is typing in a Google Doc, it’s like a piece of paper. But kids are incredibly inventive, and they’ve managed to turn Google Docs into a de facto communication and social media hub. It’s become a staple of the workplace - easily shareable, great for collaboration, and with a fool-proof autosave feature.įor these same reasons, Google Docs for kids has also become popular in schools, with many children using it for schoolwork, homework assignments, and even group projects. If you’re hoping to do more with it, you should look elsewhere for a more thoughtfully designed, and scalable, communication method.Is Google Docs safe for kids? Many parents are familiar with Google Docs, Google’s online word processing app. If you’re only using the phone app and only for chatting with a limited number of friends socially, which is clearly the use case they have decided to laser focus on, you’ll be fine with it. The conversations are spaced relatively far apart and take up way too much screen real estate. The alphabetical sorting of conversations means hunting down the person you were just talking to. It’s completely unwieldy with more than 20 active conversations. I used Hangouts and now use Chat in a professional environment, for more casual short form comms, and it’s clear after 6 weeks of heavy use that Chat wasn’t designed for anything more than light usage. Google Chat is at its best on the mobile app, but if you’re using it regularly, across mobile and in the desktop chrome extension, you’ll quickly see the questionable choices made by the developers. Unfortunately, that’s about where the improvements end. That’s really nice and a feature we were hoping for coming from Hangouts. Google Chat added the ability to have rooms where specific topic threads can be created. We'll pass this along to the team so they can review and make the Chat app even better.
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. I suggest adding a setting to switch between formats perhaps, as I know not everyone is unhappy with it, but for those who are it's quite important.
In short, although the function of the app is amazing, the modernization of it has ruined its aesthetic It looks more like the default messages app or whatsapp and fails to stand out as a result. Of course, it's still the best way to communicate for us (we all possess different phone brands so for the two Apple users out of our large friend group, it's much more efficient to talk to the rest of the group and for them to talk to us. Most of my friend group uses google chat to communicate, and upon the update taking place we've all been quite unhappy with it. The "read" symbol just floats awkwardly at the side of a text, and as mentioned previously it's very dark. The new format, although still clean and simple, is not perfect. Said previous format was much more simplistic (though not oversimplified) and clean, it was essentially perfect. It doesn't look terrible, but compared to the previous format it is far inferior. In an attempt to be modern, the app has been downgraded. The new format is off-putting and unnecessarily dark. New format update was upsetting, otherwise works perfectly