Slack tips & links

You can set up which notifications you will receive from Slack under your Preferences (shown below). We urge you to enable at least direct mentions and replies to threads.

We also urge you to enable all notifications in the #announcements channel so you will get notifications about announcements related to the class. You can then set up per-channel notification settings under channel details:

1. Click on the Channel Details button on the top right corner (the circled i).
2. Click on the More (…) button and there is an option to set up notifications for the channel in the pop-up menu that shows up.

Because slack is used for the whole class, a flurry of messages on different topics can be daunting. You can create a thread to respond to a message (e.g., to answer somebody's question or to ask for clarification). You can learn about how to create channels here. Also, you get notifications when someone messages in a thread you are in.

You can use private channels for discussion among yourselves. You can create channels by clicking the ⊕ icon right next to Channels in the sidebar. You can make them private by selecting Make private option while creating the channel.

We set up Zoom integration for Slack so you can create Zoom meetings in a channel to move the discussion to an audiovisual medium: Type /zoom to create a call over Zoom. You can type /zoom help to learn more about the Zoom app.

You may need to add the Zoom app to your Slack account and integrate Zoom & Slack for this to work, let me know if there are any issues.

Slack has some basic text formatting capabilities (lists, bold and italic formatting, code) and by default it has a rich text editor that you can use. If you prefer markdown, you can disable the rich text editor. I added a link to the resources section that shows how to do this.

You can share code snippets by clicking the paperclip button right next to the text box and choosing Create new… > Code or text snippet. You can choose a programming language so Slack can add syntax highlighting.

Here are some links to Slack's own documentation. They are mostly oriented for employees using Slack in a corporate setting but there are some good tips in there.

• Slack 101 - getting started with slack
• Running a poll using emoji responses
• Uploading and sharing files
• Composing Slack messages only with markdown
• Slack markdown syntax This resource is intended for Slack app developers but it describes the basic markdown syntax you can use to format your messages.