For the digital humanities seminar I am co-teaching this semester, I designed a unit called Collaboration, Communication, and Presentation, or CCP. The Communication portion involves writing workshops that hone students’ writing in terms of length, clarity, and style for different audiences and platforms. The Presentation portion includes information about good presentation styles both in person and online with digital projects and sites. This tutorial about Slack is part of the Collaboration portion. Slack is the ultimate group project program as it has so many ideal functions for groups to share and organize their thoughts and media. Slack is free to use and has additional apps that can sync with group workspaces to meet the specific needs of that particular group. What I especially like about Slack is that it has all the functions of other good collaborative programs, so you as a group can consolidate and keep all your information in one place. You can organize conversations about certain topics into “Channels” instead of sending multiple email chains or GroupMes. You can send media in each specific channel that Slack will store and archive for you. You can pin or star certain messages that might contain decisions or links you want to view later in a neat list of all pinned/starred messages. You can make phone calls to group members and share just about any type of media. Because Slack is an online site, you can access your workspace on any computer and on your phone with Slack’s phone app. It’s the best combination of email, GroupMe, Facebook Messaging, Google Drive, and Skype, and I recommend it to anyone who is part of a rather involved group project.
Click the photo below to find the PDF tutorial that walks through the basics of Slack. Visit https://slack.com/ to create your own workspace today!
