I know there have been past discussions about this, but it’s almost 2024, and I’m interested in the latest recommendations folks may have.
Our team had Slack for 2 or 3 years, but in 2019 the school removed it, due to it not aligning with all the rules of the school district and the state.
What we have now is school-based student email accounts + a few Google groups that include students & mentors that hang off the school’s internet domain. The students, other than announcements and the like sent by captains, do not use email at all. Like zero messages sent. When we had Slack, communications was lively between meetings; now it either doesn’t exist or it is happening in Discord (by students only - we mentors are hesitant to go there given hard lines set by school).
If anyone with a team at a highly risk averse school has found a communications solution that is both useful to the team and acceptable to the school, please share. I feel like we’re at a disadvantage, and it’s only getting worse as time passes. Email alone is not a solution.
It sounds like your school may use Google Workspace for Education. If so, Google Chat may be a good option if not disabled. We use Google Chat with a variety of Google Chat Spaces for team communication. Students can access it on their Chromebooks and install the Google Chat app on their phone, which makes the engagement barrier lower.
Our former programming captain on the team when Slack was disallowed researched & suggested this right away, and I still like this option. The team even offered to do the hosting, but my sense is the administrators didn’t like that (too uncontrolled). I also remember a comment like “if we enable this for your club then to be fair we’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor have to enable it for all clubs…”, indicating a concern about administrative overhead.
I have mentioned this option a couple times (full disclosure: I work at Microsoft). The school is using Google’s services at this point, though, so it’s unlikely they’d use Teams.
Someone mentioned that in the past, but I recall (at least with our school) no adults are allowed in that are not school employees, so we mentors would not be included.
I saw Google Hangouts might have been revamp’d into a good Slack alternative. Anyone use it?
Honestly, any tool that has the equivalent of Slack channels, archives data sufficiently to meet requirements, and enables DMs to be switched off will be worth considering. Thanks for the suggestions.
Have you thought of the Band App at all? It’s good for announcements and such; I know you can disable DMs and such; I’m not sure exactly what your school’s requirements are but it’s worth a look.
Second this, we’re using the same setup and it’s good enough, they also have an EDU and non profit version which gives you custom groups and adv permissions if you have the ability to go down that route (which I think would remove the need for the disable dm plugin and allow mentors to still dm each other).
I use it for a group chat with some friends. I suspect you could get it working reasonably well, although you’d probably have to create separate spaces for each thing that used to be a slack channel which would make adding people harder. It’s definitely not as good as slack, but it should be better than email.
Check if the objection is “you’re not a school employee” or just “you don’t have a school-administered Google account”. The team I mentored previously created accounts for all of the mentors to use for robotics communications. The school can reset the password on any account in their organization if they want to look at the user’s activity. Also, they don’t need to blanket-enable or approve external accounts, which simplifies their security going forward.
They may also have prerequisites – background check, fingerprinting, sign a policy – all of which should happen anyway. If there are any non-faculty sports coaches, there’s probably already a process for this.
Dear school: What we do is fundamentally different from every other club on campus. Our club occupies a spot in the top 20% in a high tech machine sport where all of our players are expected to go pro. However, our players cannot realize their potential without an opportunity to practice. In addition to attending scheduled practices at our workshop, our players also practice on the Internet, using a professional-grade collaboration tool.
Yeh, no matter how well we wordsmith it or present it or to whom, the “we’re special and really need this” argument hasn’t worked. After 3 proposals in 4 years, each of which included a version of the message you wrote (including the only sport where everyone can go pro line), I’m not too optimistic.
I think I’m going to look into the Google Spaces thing because the capability might just be sitting there, latently compatible with the school’s environment, and if so MAYBE we could just get permission to start using it. Introducing a new tool is a much bigger hill to climb… I really like the Mattermost option, but it was already proposed a few years ago and rejected.
+1 to being friendly with IT.
It’s helped us when it came to getting our own communication system (Slack) up and running, and also just for general computer stuff. Makes life a lot easier.
I’m a big fan of Discord which has been getting a lot better about moderation but I do recognize it has issues with the fundamental design that make it unsavory for many schools. The fact that it offers for free what Slack charges for is a big plus tho, particularly the infinite message history and custom emoji.
My college primarily uses GroupMe for smaller clubs but that may not be great since that’s just a single channel, the closest clubs to FRC primarily use Slack anyway.
If you really want to go old school, I think Skype still exists, and I don’t think it’s hard to boot up IRC.
Theoretically, Google Docs could be used but that sounds extremely painful.
My team’s official communication platforms are Microsoft Teams, Remind (for announcements and during competition), email, and we use a shared Google Group and Google folder for files.
However, we have the same problem: students barely use Teams, and most discussion happens in Discord servers. And what makes it worse is each subteam has their own server, so it’s not very clear what the communication platform is.
Have any teams found a solution to a problem where students just don’t use Teams? From what I gather, students find Teams too “school” or “corporate” — our school is a Microsoft school, the presence of mentors and our team coach (a teacher), and maybe students dislike the topic-based format of Teams.
My university teams use Slack, but unfortunately the cost + blocked on the school wifi makes it difficult.
That may have less to do with teams and more with what apps students already use. Given you have subteam discords I would guess that your students already use discord more and therefore tend to just use discord since they’re already there. Teams isn’t a drastically different format from Discord/Slack as far as I can tell (although I’ve barely used Discord) so I doubt it’s a format issue. I have had some trouble with Teams notifications, but I suspect that’s more that I just haven’t needed them enough at any point to set them up.
If your team is associated with a non-profit you should be able to get free access to slack pro, although that won’t solve the blocked on the wifi issue.
We are on slack now after trying Google classroom, discord, remind and band over the years.
Google classroom was great when I was a district employee still and when we offered graded credit for robotics. Now however trying to use the education products without a district account would be nearly impossible. I loved that system.
Discord was fine from a technical standpoint but too open and we had too many parents object to it due to difficulty learning and the ability for students to connect to other groups easily. If you’re gonna pick one of these just get slack. It at least seems safer on paper. Doesn’t matter though if the school doesn’t allow it.
Remind we used for announcements but as the only communication tool it’s not good enough. Students need a way to have group areas to discuss topics, pass quick sub team messages and files, etc. Even just trying to send out announcements is tedious with the built in limits. It’s a good basic tool but not gonna meet the full needs of a team.
Band. I liked band. I liked the events, polls, notices, messaging with parents. The only complaint people had was the lack of control over notifications and people not understanding how to use it effectively. I think with better training and a better team attitude band is awesome. Our team as a whole felt that it wasn’t working because people stopped checking it due to too many notifications. I’m not sure how Slack will be any better but maybe just having more channels and less group chats is the winning answer.
