Dear Students and Parents!

We are excited to announce we are testing an online chat with your teacher this spring.

For many years we have been looking for a solution to implement a way for you to directly contact your teacher without compromising teachers’ privacy, while maintaining accountability to the front desk for scheduling matters.

We think that we may now have a solution that will allow for this, and will be testing it from now until the end of June.

How do you use this?

It is very simple. Start by going to your teacher’s page:

You will see the chat on the right-hand side of the page.

There is a #general channel, which is where you will always start, and which we will use for school-wide announcements.

This is followed by your #teacher-name channel, which you can use to chat directly with your teacher.

To start using the chat, please click the green ‘Join this chat’ button. You will be prompted on how to access the chat. It is possible that you will also be able to download the app that drives this chat, Slack. If that turns out to be the case, you should be able to bypass using the website, and communicate directly from your phone or home computer. We are not sure about this, at present.

Please note

  • we are not requiring our team to respond to messages in real-time. For the test period we are asking them respond within 48h, or as soon as is practical for them. Our teachers have many things on their plates, and we want to be sure this system will be as practical for them as we hope it will be for you.
  • you cannot use this for scheduling, and teachers have been instructed to direct any and all scheduling queries to the front desk, as is currently the case.
  • for anything that is time sensitive, you should call the office.
  • bear in mind that this is essentially a public forum, which means that anything you post will be visible publicly.
  • we will be monitoring these channels and may interact with you directly.

That’s it! We look forward to seeing you in chats with your teacher, and encourage you to test it out by saying hello to your teacher just to see if it works, and even if you don’t have a question right now. We may call you over the next couple of months to ask you about your experience and see what you think about this.

Thank you very much!

Barnaby & the ABC Teaching Team