Your students have 113 minutes for Tiktok. Here's how to earn some.

This has us questioning everything: Kids spend 113 minutes daily on TikTok in the U.S.

That's nearly two hours. Every. Single. Day.

Oh, and they open the TikTok app 20 times per day. Twenty separate decisions to choose TikTok over literally everything else on their phone. Including that assignment you spent three hours perfecting.

Now before you start drafting your "back in my day" speech, meet Sarah Vargas, our Senior Accreditation Manager. She's spent ten years watching this exact shift happen—first as a classroom teacher, then across four different EdTech companies. And she's got some thoughts about why your students pick endless scrolling over your carefully crafted lesson plans.

(It's not what you think.)

The 3 Questions That Win Back Student Attention

Look, nobody wants to admit this, but… your students aren't choosing TikTok because they have shorter attention spans. They're choosing it because it's actually good at holding their attention.

Our Senior Accreditation Manager at Subject, Sarah Vargas, is constantly thinking about this issue when talking to schools. When educators and school leaders think about how to compete with TikTok, it comes down to three questions educators must consider before curriculum changes, new processes, or tool implementation:

1. Would kids actually choose to watch this? No, “because it’s required” is not a good enough answer. Seriously ask yourself: Would students voluntarily click play on your content the same way they choose TikTok videos? Think about turning individual lessons into episodes of a bigger story. Math becomes detective cases that require algebra to solve. Science turns into exploration adventures where students discover concepts through curiosity, not explanation.

2. Does this make the teacher's job easier? Great content shouldn't turn you into tech support. Vargas has seen too many "engaging" platforms that look amazing in demos but create nightmares in real classrooms. The best educational content works seamlessly with what you're already doing—no new passwords, no hour-long tutorials, no troubleshooting when the principal walks in.

3. Can the principal show this works? School leaders need more than engagement metrics. They need proof that compelling content actually improves learning outcomes. When you can show real data about student comprehension and completion rates, suddenly everyone's interested in supporting what you're doing.

Vargas puts it simply: new content, especially video courses, should be entertaining and short so “kids don’t get bored.” Students choose to learn, teachers feel supported, and administrators see results. That's better education, but also the kind of change that transforms entire schools. 

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