Kik for teachers... (an introduction)

I've been introduced to Kik, a messaging service.


Here's the history:

Our beliefs

We believe the smartphone era will be a transformation as big as the rise of the PC or the creation of the Internet. Your smartphone is actually part of you: always on, always connected, and always with you. And your smartphone puts the world in your pocket, wherever and whenever you want it.

As the first smartphone messenger with a built-in browser, Kik Messenger lets you talk to your friends and browse and share any web site with your friends on Kik. For developers, we've built amazing tools to help optimize their web sites for mobile and for Kik. By doing this, we believe we have the chance to usher in the next era - the era of the mobile web.

Our story

Kik was founded in 2009, when a small but incredibly passionate group of University of Waterloo students decided to build a company that would shift the center of computing from the PC to the phone.

Fast forward to today, and Kik Messenger has become the simplest, fastest, most life-like chat experience you can get on a smartphone. And unlike other messengers, Kik usernames - not phone numbers - are the basis for Kik user accounts, so our users are in complete control of who they talk to on Kik.

But Kik isn’t just about instant messaging. Kik fans are already exchanging videos, sketches, stickers and more, with mobile web pages optimized for Kik using Kik's Developer Tools that help developers optimize, distribute and monetize their web content. And with our new built-in browser, users can search for and send any web site - all without leaving Kik, and all without downloading anything new.

How can a teacher be isolated from a valuable connecting tool like kik?

The value of this service is the connections that 

Many thanks to J. Samuels for introducing me to Kik.  
Here's his advice:
(1) Instagram (to show what you see)
(2) Kik (to invite people to parties and to see something interesting)
(3) then you get her phone number...