I think as Educational Technologist it’s an important part of my job to think about how things could be different, and how that could advance the work of the school. One domain for that futurist thinking is Communication: how teachers, coaches, and office staff interact with each other. While much of our work involves students, the planning and preparation is often just between the adults in the community. Given that, I started the following conversation with the other Tech leadership in the Bay Area.
Just as I asked a few months ago about your plans to discontinue support of voicemail, I have another question: has anybody started to use a service like Slack, designed for internal communication?
The obvious questions are: Why not just use email? Why not just use instant messaging?
There are three reasons I ask about Slack. Though designed for programmers and designers at Tech start-ups, their work is quite similar to what office staff, teachers, and coaches do at our schools. By that, I mean:
- We’re members of various teams/ groups/ committees/ departments/ or levels
- We’re engaged in in any number of short- and long-term projects
- We’re rarely all together in the same place at the same time
First, email gets cumbersome very quickly when dealing with either groups of colleagues or projects; and heaven help you if a large project crosses various groups. While search in email works well, it’s very easy to lose track of the flow of a conversation.
Second, instant messaging excels at showing the flow of a conversation, but (a) fails (i) when in a group of any size, and (ii) when dealing with a long-term project, and (b) doesn’t translate well to the asynchronous communication needed by classroom teachers and (off-campus) coaches who are unavailable for large portions of the day.
Third, neither email nor instant messaging services integrate well with the other services that schools use or could start using. I can easily imagine ways in which departmental teams could leverage RSS integration, any of the team-based To Do List services, and organization from team-based integration of file storage. I’m willing to bet that Help Desk integration is better than the annoying FreshDesk thing that gets embedded in every email I receive…
Email, like voicemail (the windmill-tilting target of my choice), is a holdover from a communication paradigm that is shifting. Email will certainly continue to exist to serve our outside communication needs — just as voicemail does. Internally, our teachers need a tool designed to support knowledge-workers — because that’s what they are.
Thoughts?