Best chat apps for university students
More and more educational establishments offer hybrid educational environments. This means students can study either offline or online. While the offline education model implies face-to-face communication, for remote learning reliable and secure communication channels are required. Student messaging apps allow both students and teachers to easily get in touch, share information, socialize and collaborate.
Instant messaging apps play a great role in the educational sector today. They are now used not only for student communication, but also for productive collaboration such as:
- Creating online classrooms
- Organizing webinars and video conferences
- Managing news channels with useful information
- Communicating within study groups
In this blog post we will discuss 5 best chat apps for university students. Besides remote learning these apps can be used for organizing effective collaboration between students who study both online and offline, their teachers and university staff.
Virola
Virola corporate messenger and collaboration tool can become extremely helpful to fulfill student communication needs. It can be hosted in-house to store all information securely and supports the following functionality:
- Video and audio chats
- Flexible permissions to allow or restrict certain functionality for specific chat rooms
- Files sharing and storage
- Convenient global and chatroom search in messages and attachments
- Private and topic-based conversation rooms
- Discussions and mentions
- Workspaces for classrooms or courses
- Updates and news channels
- Task board and issues tracking
- Screen sharing and remote control
Virola messenger can be used as an independent collaboration tool for running webinars and presentations, helping students with their tasks, assigning and checking tasks, private students' communication.
RocketChat
RocketChat is an open-source tool which makes it very flexible in terms of integration. It can be used as a fully featured educational platform as well as an integrated to a Learning Management System communication app. Students can use RocketChat in the following ways:
- Streamline communication with teachers, other students and university staff
- Enhance collaboration by creating various teams, channels and workspaces
- Share files, documents and samples of works safely
- Chat in video and audio meeting rooms
RocketChat guarantees a high level of security and thus students and teachers can exchange papers and research details without fearing data thefts.
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is a collaboration tool which can be successfully used for student communication. It can be either used in a cloud or installed on-premise to help students, teachers and university staff to:
- Communicate in private and topic-based rooms
- Allow teachers to explain the material using the live videos, images, screen annotations, and whiteboards within groups and remote screen share facilities
- Conduct online classes, webinars, various meetings with university staff and parents
Troop Messenger is a great tool for student and student-to-teacher chats, online classes and webinars. It significantly facilitates communication between students, teachers and university staff and allows keeping all information in one place.
Microsoft Teams
For educational institutions working in Microsoft 365 environment Microsoft Teams can become a great tool to reach out to students, parents, colleagues and university staff. It helps educators to:
- Keep assignments organized
- Setup virtual classrooms
- Integrate and collaborate in real time in Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Besides powerful student communication and collaboration tools Microsoft Teams has various additions to bring more fun to communication:
- Expressing emotions with Feelings Monster
- Happier and healthier learning community with Reflect
Microsoft Teams bridges the gap between educational and professional environments by giving students an opportunity to communicate and succeed in classrooms and beyond.
Slack
Though Slack is widely known as a tool for corporate communication, it can be used for student chats and communication with teachers and university staff:
- Ask and answer questions in private or project-based chatrooms
- Share instant updates and announcements
- Create workspaces for different courses
- Share invitation links
- Start voice chats and share files
- Create threads and mention co-workers
- Take advantage of various integrations, e.g. with Zoom, Salesforce, etc.
Slack can be efficiently used not only to bring together students, teachers and university staff, but also to extend the network. The combination of Slack integrations and available features makes this tool very flexible and convenient for educational organizations.