D6PBL (on Slack)

So I was struggling to come up with the 12th reply to a post (that wasn't repetitive at this point) and one of the things I saw that kept coming up in other people's posts was the desire to have some type of continuation of PBL discussion with the members of our cohort. So, I made a Slack team for us:

Click here to sign up

I set it up so that anyone with a spart6.org or d6du.org email address could sign up. 

If you've never used Slack before, it's pretty much one of the best messaging apps I've ever seen. I've included some information for you below:

Getting started for new users

And here's a more detailed overview for those of you who have never heard of it:

What is Slack and how does it work? - Pocket-lint

Let me digress for a moment. I use Slack as a backchannel chat option for my own classes. I've learned there are 3 kinds of people who slack: those who use it as intended, those who use it to post memes and/or other distracting stuff, and those who don't use it. So, just be aware of that if you think about using it with students. I had to basically make a "Memeteam" channel for some of my kids so that they wouldn't clutter up the general channels where we actually got work done. Before I did that, a lot of productivity was lost to spam.

Anyway, back on topic, Slack is cool because it's a group discussion, and you can also very easily post links/share files through it. It's a simple drag-and-drop for files (my kids use it for collaboration a lot) as long as you're not dropping massive files in there (think long videos).

Slack has a pretty slick mobile app, but be warned if there's a lot of activity going on in a slack channel, you may want to turn push notifications off for it on your phone.

I think Slack is really cool, and I think it has a lot of potentials; I hope people sign up/actually use it if they're serious about keeping the discussion going.

Thanks, everyone, it's been a great series of classes.