What is all this now?

• Send and receive less email!
• Collaborate with co-workers in a natural way that's organized like chat rooms (#engaginglearners, #plc, #ipads, etc.)
• Make your own Slack team for your class or department!
• "a private Twitter on steroids" - medium.com
• "the first LMS that would support learning by default" - medium.com
• Recommended for... everyone! This tool is for all subjects and grade levels.
• Highly recommended for... History, Bible, English, Journalism, and Programming.

Okay... go on...

Facebook Messenger. iMessage. WeeChat. If an app isn't already a dedicated chat service it probably has an integrated chat these days, but have you ever thought to use chat in the classroom? Or to collaborate with your co-workers? You should!

Probably the biggest problem with most other chat services is they exist as proprietary "islands", land-locking anyone that use them. With Slack this is not the case. Slack has integrations with many different web services that you probably already use: Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Dropbox, Twitter, GitHub, and many more! Slack also has a wide range of bots for things like polls, productivity, feedback, etc. (Think "there's an app for that" but specifically for chat).

Slack has seen meteoric growth in the tech startup sector and I believe it's set to revolutionize not only how our students collaborate in the classroom, but how we, as teachers, collaborate (vertical alignment, anyone?). With so many chat services out there, it can be hard to justify choosing one, but Slack has a powerful feature set and is highly customizable. Best of all, it's free*!

(Did I mention you'll send and receive less email?)

*They also have a paid plan with more features that's highly discounted for education: $1/mo. per active user. That's 85% off their normal price!

Sign me up!

Great! Bring a device! Slack is cross-platform. It also runs in web browsers.