I know you have heard of chat and hangouts but did you know they took these two things and made them one?
What is it?
It is like Google took the best of Hangouts and mashed it with a chat room. You can still chat like you did before but adding a Room can help elevate and focus your conversations.
Getting Started
Start by visiting this page to download the mobile and desktop app.
Once it is installed, you must use your district Google account as your login. It appears Hangouts Chat is currently only available to G Suite users and not for personal accounts.
Chatting
The following screenshots are from the desktop app.
You will find this on the far left side of the screen.
1. Click plus to start chatting with a person, create a room or use a bot.
2. These are the people I have chatted with in the past day. The green dot means someone is online.
I clicked Doug and our conversation appeared.
You can find these tools in the bottom right corner of the chat window.
1. Upload - anything from your device.
2. Drive - add anything that is located in your Drive.
3. Video - sometimes talking face to digital face is just better.
4. Emoji - Add some basic emojis.
5. Send - You can also send by hitting the enter key.
Room
Think of this as a virtual PLC or team meeting. You can chat, share resources and work on projects all within this room. The conversations are threaded to keep everything organized.
1. Click Person, room or bot in the upper left corner.
2. Click Create Room.
Name your room and click Create.
Near the bottom of your screen, you will find the green Add People & Bots. Click that to add your buddies.
Type in the names of the people you want to add.
Click Send.
A sample of what conversations look like in a Room.
Thread 1 - Apps to Consider. Any conversation about apps would happen within this thread.
Thread 2 - Websites of Interest - Anything related to sites would appear within this thread.
Note: Rooms are limited to 8,000 people.
Why Rooms?
It keeps the conversation focused. You could have multiple rooms for each subject or prep that you teach. This room idea might be useful to students who are grouped together for various projects.
Please visit the Hangouts Chat learning center page for a detailed look at what this new tool can do.
We enabled it a couple weeks back when it first launched. I've played with it a lot, particularly the bots feature (building our own to augment the helpdesk and for task tracking on the team) and room structure. The one thing I don't like about it so far is that room conversations are threaded, and they push off the screen once other conversations get going. I _do_ like that you can search for conversations in the app now. It's important to remember that the app is new and they'll be improving a lot, quickly.
ReplyDeleteSorry for a double post, but I had another thought.
ReplyDeleteHangouts messages between individuals will automatically push over to Chat. If you have a goup message going in normal Hangouts, that will not move over to Chat because of the new Rooms structure. We had issues with some people using Chat and others in old Hangouts and we would miss messages. Make sure to communicate any change and make the switch at the same time.
Thanks for letting me know about the new Room chat structure. I did notice people responding to me using the older Chat. Will have to let people know to download the new app and start using that to communicate within the district.
ReplyDelete