Facilitating Online Support

We use Slack to facilitate real-time, persistent chat among all students and instructors. This is a highly beneficial tool, and through Slack we can offer high levels of support to our students. Please make the most of Slack as you teach for us, and feel free to bring up any ideas about how we can further improve our Slack experience with the Director or larger team.

Slack has a very good set of documentation. Please visit the Slack Help Pages to learn more about all of the things mentioned below. Click the links below for direct links into the Slack Help Pages referring to the features being discussed.

Joining Slack

You can join the SU Webdev Slack with your @seattleu.edu account. Follow the instructions on the sign-up page closely (scroll down to find the link to sign-in with an SU account).

Instructor channel

Be sure to join #instructors when you are invited. This is a private channel where instructors are able to talk.

Course channels

Each course in our Slack team has a specific channel. It's important that you find and "join" your course channel in Slack. When you get into your course you can look up your students in Slack and invite them to the course channel. Try to do that during the first week of class. Most students will find the course channel and join without prompting, but Slack can be confusing for some students who are less experienced with social chat tools.

Note: If you are teaching courses early in the sequence, you may have students who have never used Slack before. It's important to interact with them via Slack and help them learn the ropes as they complete those first courses. This is a tool that will benefit them for many years to come.

Posting

In Slack the default post is just a message. However, you can use the "+" sign next to the message to make different types of posts. For some things, such as uploading screenshots or weekly welcome posts, it may be preferable to use an alternate post format.

In addition to using the proper post type, understanding formatting in Slack can help make your messages more understandable. Review the Slack guides to formatting messages for more about how you can control the presentation of your words.

Notifications

You can install Slack pretty much anywhere. There are webapps and native apps that should suit everyone's needs. You can also configure very specifically how Slack sends you notifications. Please take advantage of these features to allow Slack to fit into your life. Obviously we don't want you to be oppressed by being constantly on-call, but for the most part we've found that Slack intrusions are manageable. Often we can help somebody with just a couple minutes of effort, and that can save the student hours of their week.

Private chats

You can create private channels and direct messages for students. Students themselves can create private channels for discussion. Review the Slack documentation for more information about how these can be managed. When you run a command in the private channel (for example, to start a video chat), it is usually only the people in that private channel who can see it. This is very handy for working with students.

Slack apps

We have a few apps installed in Slack to help us communicate. Most of them are passive and enhance all the messages in the channel. But some of them give us new commands. You can run commands by typing a message that begins with a slash (/) and a command word. Two Slack commands you should be familiar with are: /appear and /hangout. These commands will each create a video chat using either Appear.in or Google Hangouts. You should try these commands out on your own and make sure you have your computer configured so you can use these tools when you need.

Note: Using these video chat tools allows us to share screens with students. When a student can share her screen with us, then we can easily help just as effectively as we can in lab. This is a hugely powerful capability. Rather than getting frustrated trying to figure out problems in text chat, please don't be bashful about saying to the student, "I think we need to do a video chat. I can do that [today, tomorrow, etc.] at XYZ time." or "Can you get on a video chat with me? I need to see what you're doing in order to help you."

Additional discussion

Everyone is encouraged to make the most of Slack. Please be aware that everyone is always "joined" on the #general channel. You should review the Slack guidelines for using the General channel in order to avoid spamming the entire team. We actively use the #random channel, and when we are at conferences we post in the #conferences channel. Feel free to create or suggest creating any other channels we need.