Our teacher certification program is in full swing. All day every day through the end of the month. We finished off the first course about a week ago and are currently covering data structures and methods - teaching methods that is.

All day every day is pretty intense and doing it on Zoom doesn't help so we try to change things up. As with many Zoom based classes, we make use of breakout rooms for small group work. We also use Slack for text based communication. Personally, I prefer Zulip but didn't have a chance to switch things over.

Of course we visit them while in breakout rooms we also use Slack polls while they're in the rooms since the visits take time and sometimes we just want a quick temperature check.

The problem is that we're finding that often, the rooms ignore the slack. This wasn't a surprise. Whenever we visit rooms, they're always engrossed and engaged in the task. Usually one of them is screen sharing and they're all in deep discussion. More often than not they don't notice us at all until we say something - that's actually kind of cool.

In any event, we decided to try to address the issue. We asked that each breakout room have one person who's job would explicitly be mannign Slack so that when we sent something we'd get a response.

Topher suggested that we call said person the "designated slacker." Who doesn't want to be that????

That is all.