Why a School Staff Should Use Slack

Slack is a collaboration platform for communication and sharing and is used primarily in business, but lately, it's been finding it way in the classroom. Slack allows for group and direct messaging, file sharing, and third-party app integrations such as Google Drive. And, one of the best parts of Slack is that it's FREE!

Slack functions like Twitter in that it uses mentions (@) and hashtags (#) to organize conversations that can take place in specific theme based channels.  Slack is essentially an inter-office chat and collaboration service that allows teams of people to digitally communicate and collaborate with each other.  
School staff should take a look at using Slack for the following reasons:

1. Email: Slack can greatly reduce email clutter and negate the need for teachers to sift through their email, finding what’s important while disregarding email that either doesn’t pertain (group email) to them or sift through junk mail.

2. Polls: Slack is an easy way to distribute a poll to large or small groups of a team using an add on called Simple Poll.  Perhaps you only want a single department to respond to a poll instead of the whole staff. Simply create a poll and include it in the proper channel.

3. Communication: Create a channel titled "announcements."  Then, place any announcements you may have in that channel.  Slack is also a time saver.  Instead of walking across campus to tough base with someone, simply send them a message in Slack.

4. Sharing Documents:  Slack is great for sharing documents.  Since it works with Google Docs, uploading from Docs to Slack is a snap.  Sharing docs through Slack is a great alternative, especially if you're always hitting your storage limit in your email.

5. Collaboration: Sometimes it can be difficult for a department to meet and collaborate.  Slack makes it easy.  Teachers can create a channel for their department.  Using their Slack channel, they can ask questions, share lessons, and discuss what their doing.  

6. No Phone Number Necessary: With Slack, a phone number is not necessary.  Instead of asking teachers for cell phone numbers  (which may or may not be awkward or perhaps they prefer not to have their phone number out there) so you can message them, all you need is their school email address and their in your Slack workspace.