Many of today’s teens seemingly can’t survive without checking their smartphones several times a day.

Trivia Crack, Snapchat and Vine are some of the most popular apps for teens these days, and while they are typically used for social or entertainment purposes, some high school teachers have found educational uses for these apps.

“Any time you can connect into their world or sort of plug into what they are already interested in, it’s going to make your classroom content more believable and they will buy into it more,” says Emily Huff, a Spanish teacher and technology coach at Denver High School in Iowa who has used social apps as educational tools.

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High school teachers have used these apps to teach foreign languages, English, science and more.

— Snapchat: The students in Huff’s Spanish class completed a vocabulary assignment using the app,which allows users to send each other images, messages and short videos that disappear seconds after they are opened.

Huff’s students had to take pictures of real-life examples of their vocabulary words, such as the trunk of a car, and caption the photo with the word in Spanish. Students saved the images to a “Snapchat Story,” a feature that allows a user to save a series of photos for up to 24 hours that can be viewed by all of his or her contacts on the app.

Since she had to connect with her students on the app in order to view their Snapchat Stories, she created a classroom account and discussed being appropriate on social media with her students, she says, since she was able to see any other stories they posted.

Using Snapchat to complete the assignment wasn’t mandatory, but frequent users loved having the option, she says. Some even found ways to use Snapchat to complete other assignments.

— Trivia Crack: Users of this best-selling app compete against familiar or random opponents by answering questions about history, science and more — similar to the classic game Trivial Pursuit.

Deb Norton, a technology integration specialist at Appleton East High School in Wisconsin, says the app is wildly popular with the school’s students. Some teachers at the school found a way to take advantage of that popularity by hosting battles between classes, she says.

“It’s truly educational, so I’m like, ‘We have to make the best of this,'” she says.

Here’s how it worked: Each class participating in the battle had an account, and the students in each class answered the questions together.

Norton says the activity allowed the teachers to show their students they cared about their interests and addressed behavior issues too, as some students wanted to play Trivia Crack on their own cellphones at inappropriate times.

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— Vine: Users can piece together short videos — up to six seconds long — that play in a loop with the app.

Huff, the Spanish teacher, has used Vine to showcase activities on a classroom account.

“We have a couple different games that we play that can get pretty intense,” she says. She’ll make a quick Vine when the activity gets interesting to show her other classes.

Teachers could also use Vine in the classroom by having students create Vines of science experiments or of themselves acting scenes from Shakespeare, for example, according to this post from Edutopia, a website that offers instructional ideas to educators.

These activities could also be done on Instagram, a photo-sharing app with a video function similar to Vine.

But incorporating these smartphone apps into instruction is not without its challenges — some schools ban cellphones and some students don’t use these apps.

Huff only offers the option to use the apps for out-of-class assignments, since her students aren’t supposed to have cellphones in class, and no student is required to use one.

Using these apps for assignments has made her life a little easier, too.

“I can easily grade the fact that so-and-so did their assignment with just a couple clicks,” she says.

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