Snapchat Geo-Filters--- SO EASY! #busedu

Today is my daughter's 11th birthday. As a "tech mom" I felt compelled to do something cool this year--get her a Snapchat filter at our house and on our "cul de sac" so that her friends at her party will be able to use "her filter" (and it went live this morning!).

I spent under $20 (for around 20,000 square feet area and it runs from 7 AM on Thursday until noon on Saturday) and it literally couldn't be any easier. You go here at the Snapchat website and perform three steps-- Design, Map, and Buy.

They have templates now, so designing can be done on their website. I mean, EASY. I didn't use the templates, but you could do that simply. Or, you can create your own in Photoshop, Illustrator, or other software (or even free using Pixlr, PicMonkey, or Canva--note that now you have to have Canva for business to export transparent PNG but you can take it to LunaPic or another site to make the background transparent). The main trick is that you have to follow their rules (can't use hashtags, photos, logos that aren't yours, phone numbers/URLs/personal info, etc.) and save as transparent PNG with 1080x1920 size.

Sounds like a fun class project, but their terms and conditions do require you to be 18 to order an on-demand filter, so just be aware of that. However, just creating one and not actually uploading it to Snapchat might be a fun end of year project! They could create for an event at school or for their own event! Maybe even have them design a few different options.

***SNAPCHAT PROJECT SCORING GUIDE***

**My students would not be able to get on the Snapchat site since it's blocked on school devices, but on the scoring guide, I pasted the text of the guidelines for if they were going to submit it. Certainly, they can take their PNG home and upload with parental permission if they really wanted to purchase a design.