CS Teaching Tool: Slack

Probably many on Steemit know about Slack. For those few that haven't, Slack is a chat program with customizable public and private rooms. Recently they've integrated voice chat and even screen sharing into this app. Follow the link I provided if you want to know more. I championed Slack in my office and it has become the go-to application for communication on work teams split up between two cities and other remote workers.

In a past post: https://steemit.com/teaching/@rantar/teaching-computer-science-remotely I talked about the tools we use to facilitate remote teaching. The biggest frustration is how we use Skype. Skype for the main classroom presentation works well. Projecting a video on the big screen and seeing the students is exactly what Skype is built to do. However, connecting up with individual students via separate Skype rooms that are always on has been a bit clunky. Here are the current issues I have:

1. Students never seem to notice when a remote teacher joins a channel.
2. Skype loves to forget audio settings so we have to keep fiddling half the time.
3. The screen share visual quality seems rather poor.
4. While you can share a screen, you can't seem to share control, or even a have a pointer. Sometimes it's hard to communicate with the student about what part of the code I am talking about.
5. While Skype has a chat, there is no channel for between teacher communication that is also not visible to students. We've already started using Slack for this teacher to teacher communications.

So here is how I envision integrating Slack. We'd keep Skype for the main classroom chat. This will keep Skype doing what it does best. The students will not have individual Skype meetings. Instead, the students will join the teachers in Slack. Now the teachers will still have DMs and a private room for communications that the student should see, but there will also be a common room for posting links and resources for all students. Then remote teachers can DM students directly via chat, and utilize Skype's build in screen and control sharing as needed to work with the student. I have used Slack in just this way to train junior programmers at my job and it has worked great. Slack has a web-based option, so no extra installs required, which can be a pain in some lab settings and its notification system is much stronger than Skype. Using Slack can overcome all of the issues I listed above. I should add that Skype has a free version which should cover enough functionality to support how we'd use it in a classroom setting.

Let me know in the comments about any feedback to this idea, or if you've used Slack in teaching remotely.

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