Our school district, or at least the admin of the HS, has decided we must immediately stop using Slack, due to lack of school admin control/monitorability as already discussed here. From the authoritative message sent out, this is non-negotiable. Yes, bad timing.
We’re being told instead to use Remind, and I’m wondering if those of you who use it (if any of you use it) have any tips for making an good, fast transition prior to Jan 4.
I looked into Remind briefly, and the one request I asked the team’s coach to relay upward is that the team have its own “school” within Remind’s functionality, and then each former Slack channel can become a “class” within Remind. Each class has Slack channel-like communication.
I’m sorry there isn’t enough trust in your program or students to allow you to use an outside communication network.
Personally, it might be worth it to just lean fully into this and just have your team captains create a group chat on GroupMe or the like, and let them make announcements in a way that is technically unofficial. Our team has always just done this and had group chats for each subteam, none of which have ever included any adult leadership, and it has literally never once been an issue.
Your students may have different results, but I think that being forced to swap to a system like Remind is much worse for your team than just allowing students to discuss amongst themselves, a feature that Remind literally doesn’t support.
While I think the school is in the wrong here, and skirting the rules may be necessary in the long run, one of the last things you’ll want to be doing in the middle of build season is fighting the administration over messaging clients.
I would export all the Slack logs for future reference, and get started with Remind as soon as you can. I haven’t used it much, but I remember it being pretty one-sided in terms of communication, so maybe give mentors and team leads the ability to send out announcements and leave it up to the students themselves on how to communicate with each other directly.
In the future, you could use a Google Group if your school gives everyone an email address. I assume that the administration is already looking over those, so that will solve that issue.
You may want to create a google classroom as well. Classroom is basically just one big slack channel. There, students can use it to thread off by commenting on a post.
Our school has teachers who use remind, but as it is built, it’s mostly just for a broad announcement (if an assignment is due, chromebooks, etc).
Note: A private comment can also be accessed (like a dm but all the teachers can see it) by clicking on the classroom post. But this only works if the OP is assigned as an assignment. Regular posts only allows public comments.
We use Remind, but only for exactly what it’s name says. The team leadership uses it to send out meeting times, signup deadlines, outreach and event info, and other general messages. We do this because getting all team members to check apps or email for this kind of info is a lost cause in this cell phone-oriented age. I can’t imagine how it could replace Slack, though, which is a lot more than a messaging app. We have Discord for team and sub-team discussion, etc., which works just fine but probably isn’t something your school’s admin would approve of if they already don’t like Slack.
Do you know if the school is ok with letting you use other forms of communication other than Remind? We have had success with Discord but if you are being forced to solely use Remind then that is a very unfortunate situation. We don’t use Remind on the robotics team but other clubs at my school use it to send out announcements and important reminders.
Adding on… does your slack plan include guests? What if you set the admins as guests and prevent them from posting anything? They’re still “monitoring” the chat logs.
Google classroom is great for the same features that remind dose (alert to meetings/up coming events etc) but where it definitely falls short of is that a (at least in our set up) is that our teacher mentor when they post they will give notifications to all members of the classroom but when a class member posts no notifications are sent. (Quite a bummer when members are planning things)
Could making the student holding leadership positions be the teachers (yes, students can co teach a classroom, the maker of the classroom would have to send an email invite to them) solve the problem?
Not with how we had it set up the teacher we’re actually teacher and had it set up with our school email so no student could be a teacher under this system no. Running it independently from a school board possibly but then you run into the same issue in which the school cannot be monitored if independent.
Alright, that is strange. My google help desk teacher (who is also the social studies and economics teacher) was able to invite me to co teach. My mentor (technology teacher) was able to invite me too.
You may have to bring that up to your help desk. I’ll edit with screenshots of my classroom when i get to desktop.
School policies rarely make sense. Here’s my interpretation of the situation, correct me if I’m wrong: School admin don’t like the team using slack to communicate. If this is the case, I’d highly suggest like a group chat where all team members just happen to be on it, and they all just happen to be talking about robotics stuff.
In short, the exact same thing, but unofficial.
School admin can’t stop team members from getting Slack and using it to communicate amongst themselves as like a group chat kind of thing that just happens to be on robotics.
If school admin really doesn’t want people to use slack, I’d suggest one of the other alternatives: Discord, MS Teams, etc.
A similar concept could be to just use email. I’ve had friend groups which used email as the primary form of communication, with hundreds or thousands of emails going back and forth. It was definitely not an ideal communication method, but this was in an age before smartphones were ultra common. If the students all have school email addresses, I could see it being fairly effective to have a number of email chains, one for each subteam and set it up similarly to the way you had slack. Obviously, you’d lose a lot of functionality (especially readability, reactions, and threads), but it’s a solution that you likely already have the tools to complete and the administration would likely be okay with (assuming the school assigns students email addresses, which is likely.
OP, does your school and district have any kind of contract with an online classroom provider? Several people here suggested Google Classroom and I agree. I think you could also use Schoology if your district uses that (as mine does). I know there are other providers as well.
Is Google Hangouts an option? Unless the school made an intentional action to disable it, everyone with a school Google account should also have Hangouts.
Thanks for the suggestions and support. We mentors are in the process of providing feedback. One of the points I made in my feedback aligns with what many of you said: If Remind won’t meet the team’s communications needs, then students will naturally find another option outside school like Discord or text. It’s not like they’re not going to engage in group communication; that genie’s out of the bottle, and it is too valuable to not do it. Consequences: less visibility and control by the school, less mentor-student interaction (one of the key elements of the program), and more fragmented communications across the team in general.
I looked into Remind some more… Its fatal flaw is only teachers can make announcements, which is the only form of whole-class communication, and students cannot reply, though they can respond with an emoji. Maybe we can perfect robot strategy and design using only emojis to communicate . There is group chat within each class, but the max number of participants per chat is 9, and anyone not included in a given chat can’t see that chat. So that won’t really work so well. Our team is large & many Slack channels have included 3 dozen people. Maybe giving all students teacher status in a dedicated Remind instance could work? Long shot IMO.
. There is group chat within each class, but the max number of participants per chat is 9, and anyone not included in a given chat can’t see that chat. So that won’t really work so well. Our team is large & many Slack channels have included 3 dozen people. Maybe giving all students teacher status in a dedicated Remind instance could work? Long shot IMO.