How I use Slack

One thing that has been challenging me since the very beginning as a thesis advisor is the way I can keep in touch with my students. For instance, this year, I advised 6 students in their required-to-graduate-investigation, and I advised 5 students in their Master’s thesis. Besides, I have a few more students (from 2 to 4) during the 2nd semester, in order to write their master thesis pre-project, developed during the following year. It means that at given a time, I end up having to manage information and communication with 13–15 students. Using email would be gruesome because all the emails are scattered unless you organize them somehow and it’s not such an easy task. Although I know there are ways to automate the organization of emails, somehow it always felt short for my needs. So, I started to test other concepts and apps that weren’t aimed at this purpose, but that could still work the way I needed them to. After a few attempts and experiences, I found Slack.

What is Slack?

Slack is a collaboration tool that allows to centralize all the team information and team communication. Once you create a team, it allows to create groups (channels), that can be public (for all the people on your group with a # symbol) or private, with a lock symbol, where you have to invite whom you want to allow them to access the channel. The private channels content is only visible to those who were invited and that subscribe it. Besides these channels, the platform allows to have private conversations between the members. All members are added to a #general channel and they all can communicate with each other, even if they don’t share a channel. It also allows to make calls between members, which has proven to be useful when you can’t meet and writing to each other is not an option. Further than communicating, Slack allows to share documents, which has proven to be very useful.

How I use Slack

Since I have three groups of students (at the time I wrote this), I created a private group channel for each group and set a few rules, to keep things tight: the channel is for communication that involves all members (such as meetings dates or shared doubts); if there’s a need to a private conversation, then the DM must be used. These private conversations is where the students share their work with me, for review, and it allows to have an archive of their work in progress. After my review, I need to write some notes for myself, on what should be improved. So, I created for each student a private channel to which no one else has access to, where I write all my notes on the papers they submit to me. Since I didn’t have a real use for the mandatory #general channel, I renamed it and created a library, with the basic research papers that should be useful for every student.

Integrations

Slack also has a lot of integrations (some are free, other are paid) with other services, that may be useful: with other communication services (like Skype), task management bots (like To-Do bot or Kyber), calendar (with Google Calendar you can create events and reminders on specific dates and times), file management (Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, Box…), email management (MailClark)… There are also social integrations, such as Twitter, and integrations to decide who will make the next coffee run or even to share the music you’re listening to on Spotify. The possibilities are almost endless and they keep adding new integrations.

Issues

Of course there are some issues: the sign up process for new members on your team isn’t as easy as other services are. I had to supervise my students on doing so, to get them fulfill the needed steps on their first attempt. The step that proved to be confusing for them was the need to write the channel address before they created their user name and password. This leads to another issue although it isn’t connected to the service provided. The students use the email all the time with their professors. So, there isn’t much motivation for this change. However, they usually acknowledge Slack as a really useful tool in our work. And last but not least, on the desktop (not on the smartphone, though), the new message notifications only arrive when the app is open.

Pricing

Finally, the pricing. You may have all the channels and members you need for free and you can search within the oldest 10k messages, keeping all of your messaging history. You may use up to 10 integrations and voice calls are also limited, to one-on-one.

So…

My experience with Slack has been great, and it’s easing my workflow and student management, even if it’s not really meant to be used this way. Maybe it can ease off your workload too. There are apps for Mac (through the Mac App Store), Windows, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. You can also use it on your browser.