Slack

Slack is a popular instant messaging service that features persistent chat rooms (channels) and direct messaging. It is a convenient way to instantly communicate with your colleagues. 

Who can use it?

Slack is available to the Thayer community using your Dartmouth login credentials. We have our own Thayer "workspace", but it can be joined to other Dartmouth or external workspaces to enable collaboration with people outside of Thayer.

The Thayer School workspace can be accessed in a web browser at: http://thayerschool.slack.com/

What is it good for?

It is particularly useful when your collaborators aren't all in the same physical space. It can be used as an alternative to calling or emailing. It can be used synchronously, or if you miss a Slack discussion, you can come back it later and catch up.

While it has many collaboration features, there may be other solutions that fit your needs better (eg. Zoom for video conferencing or G Suite for document collaboration). Please contact Computing Services if you have questions about what tool will works best for you and your collaborators.

I want to use Slack; what's the best way to do that?

The simplest way to use Slack is to use the Thayer School workspace at thayerschool.slack.com. Here are a few different ways to use Slack, from simplest to most complex:

Direct messages: 1 to 1 communication with another user. 

Private channels: Invitation only rooms where multiple users can chat. Anyone can create a private channel and invite anyone from the Thayer School workspace. These are great for group work where the content of the channel is meant to be kept to a specific group of people.

Public channels: These channels are discoverable by anyone in the Thayer School workspace, and anyone from Thayer School can join it and see the conversation history.

Workspaces: New workspaces (i.e., something separate from the Thayer School workspace) can be created that have their own sets of channels, but this is fairly resource intensive, and should only be considered for long running projects/groups with many members. If you want to create a workspace for a specific class, you should do that using the Canvas-Slack integration.

Learn more about Slack

Here are some additional Slack resources to get you started: