What ‘Slacking Off in Class’ Is (And Is Not)
This series describes and illustrates various topics applicable to adopting Slack in your classroom. It’s mainly geared to teaching fully online though may be useful to ‘traditional’ classroom instructors. It’s also aimed at higher education but, again, may prove useful to those in PreK-12.
This series is not a manual for basic usage, nor meant to convince you to adopt, nor redirect the teaching style you value. It offers insight into implementation possibilities, suggested/best practices, and ideas to smooth adoption. Every school district, university department or campus has different policies on environments where students and their work reside. Checking policy — ensuring you understand it and have administrative support should you broaden beyond individual classes — is paramount.
I say this — a warning, really — as there’s a fair chance that after adopting Slack other teachers will ask you how they can start or complain their students won’t shut up about it. You have been warned.
Initial topics I plan on covering:
Considerations: Who Should Use Slack?
Remember, Slack is just a tool. An outstanding tool, but still just a tool. Your and your students’ experiences with Slack will only be as effective as the preparation, time, and effort applied. Like any educational experience: you get what you give. Here I list questions you should ask yourself before committing.
Setting Up Your Team (Part 1)
So you adopted Slack. Nice. Sadly, it’s not as simple as start-a-team-hey-presto-this-is-perfect. Work needs done to establish the most effective environment to students (and keep you sane while doing it). This is the nitty-gritty, back-end stuff.
Setting Up Your Team (Part 2)
You’ve got all the settings and authentication figured out and now you’re ready to start putting the team together and customizing it. Let’s do this.
Applications
We use scores of applications, piles of tools. Slack integrates them wonderfully.
Developing Your Community
You’ve got the team set up, connected your LMS and your other services, and students have joined. Now what?
Automate, Automate, Automate
One thing most teachers seem to lack: free time. Automating aspects of the Slack experience will save you time down the line (and cut down on questions like ‘What time do we meet tonight?’).
Now, let’s start Slacking.
