Launched on May 15, 2013, Google Hangouts is an application that can be added to the school-issued Chromebooks and students can chat with anyone with a Google email, as well as make voice calls and video calls. Recently, students have been using this application to chat with other students from different classes and it has become very popular throughout the community. 

Being someone who uses this application on a daily basis to chat with my friends in my classes, I think it has a lot of good benefits but at the same time has some disadvantages.

I think Google Hangouts can be useful for school at times because in some classes if my friend is sitting far away from me and I need to ask them a question, I can just use Google Hangouts to send them a chat asking them without disrupting the class by walking over to their seat. 

Another good benefit of Google Hangouts is that if a teacher makes you put your phone away at the beginning of class, you can just open up your Chromebook and still talk to your friends. 

However, Google Hangouts can be a distraction at times because if I’m using my Chromebook in class and my friend texts me through the chat application, I am tempted to check it and respond back to them. However, most of the time, I end up waiting to respond and finishing my work. 

If I had to choose, I would say that the usefulness of Google Hangouts outweighs the distraction because although it can cause students to spend the entire time talking to their friends in class and sending memes to them instead of doing their schoolwork. If every student does their work first and then uses their Chromebook to talk to their friends, it won’t be as big of a problem. 

Overall, I think that using Google Hangouts is a good application to talk to my friends and I think that it can be a distraction at times but it’s also a fun way to talk to my friends when I don’t have my phone in class.