The ESOL Volunteers Online Community is a Microsoft Teams community built by fellow volunteers for ESOL Volunteers to share tips and tricks, as well as celebrate students' and tutors' wins alike.
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Etiquette and Privacy Guidelines
Thank you so much for being part of this wonderful community. To ensure the best possible experience for all of us, please remember we are all fellow humans behind our keyboards, and please treat others as you'd want to be treated.
We'd want the "Smiles Per Interaction" for our community to be sky high 
Please reach out to the ESOL Coordinators at esl-admins at mit.edu should you see something posted in the public channels that you feel is inappropriate for the goals of our community, and may have been posted publicly by accident.
Participation is very much encouraged and we even have a [firehose] channel for "water cooler chats". So if you have a moment to relax and take a breather from the firehose-like-life at MIT, make it a FUN breather. Be sure to get your 5 sleep cycles (7.5 hours) of sleep every night though!
The channels are seen by many tutors, and it is best to keep personal information about students or yourself to private conversations. If you'd like to post a picture for a success story, please be sure to either link to the original story, or have permission from those in the picture to post it.
That being said, everyone loves a good success story, so do share your and your students' wins, whether at MIT or life wins in general. We'd love to celebrate with you, and are always on the lookout for stories for our MIT ESOL Newsletters!
Access
The community is on the mit.edu domain. Should your DLC have its separate domain, using a web browser will allow for more than one Microsoft account to use Teams by navigating to https://teams.microsoft.com/ and logging in with your mit.edu email (be sure to use a browser you are not using for your other account, this way so you won't have to log out from your main account).
Please contact the ESOL Coordinators if you do not have a Microsoft Teams account and we will help you create a GMail Teams account.
Once logged ininto Teams, you may join the community at https://teams.microsoft.com/_#/discover with the code you have received when invited to joinfrom the ESOL Coordinators.
To access the community after joining, navigate to the "Teams" button on the left navigation bar.
Note: See below on how to set Channel email notifications to stay in the loop through email rather than Teams.
Recommended Settings
Settings to make the chats easier to see at a glance, as well as recommended settings to get updates through email. Each channel can be adjusted separately.
Account: Recommended Settings (click the "..." in the upper right corner)
- Theme: Default
- Chat density: Compact
- Layout: List
Notifications: see attached image (email notifications mean Teams messages will come in emails so you won't need to open Teams)
- Email Missed activity emails: As soon as possible
Channel: Recommended Settings (hover over the channel name, click the "...")
Channel notifications: see attached image
- General: All activity
- [firehose]: Custom
- Questions and Resources: All activity
- Wins and Kudos: Custom
Quick Tips
Love participating and only have one free second? Hover over a message you like/you've found helpful and click a Like/Heart/Laugh/Surprised reaction in the upper right corner of the message, or click the extra emojis to the right of the defaults for hundreds of custom reactions:
To add formatting and other bells&whistles when posting/replying, click on the format icon below the text input line and it will open a larger box with more options:
To engage and reply to a message (AKA "Reply in Thread"), click the Reply link in the lower left corner of the message, rather than the New conversation button.
To "Start a Thread" about something new, click the purple button.
All feedback and suggestions are very welcome! Looking forward to seeing you around.