ADHD, it's all the same thing. I think that and hoarding and OCD, there's definitely a crossover. And no woman has ever said, you have to stop hoarding?  What's a fight about it sound like? I'll be her. No, but I'm saying, do you know what I mean? You're talking about, oh. That's me. Do you get quiet? Do you sulk? How do you argue? Are you passive aggressive? I don't think I'm passive aggressive, but I'm definitely not a screamer or a yeller.  People freak out. I'm gonna disappoint you. Yeah, I'm never gonna freak out. Because I'm gonna listen and I mean, I'm not perfect obviously, but I think I remain calm and try to stay logical, but I'm also, I can be out of my mind also. Irritated or like, incredibly angry? I get little frustrations. I'm not like, if there's things that make me particularly angry, like if I lose something, like my keys or something, it might be, I don't yell on screen, but I'm clear, it might not be great to be around me when I lost my keys. Interesting.  I can see like whirling through the shoe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just see them.  Right, right. All right, and then of course, OCD. Who can forget OCD? Yeah, do you have any OCD issues? I don't think I do. I'm trying to think of what I, I don't think, give me some examples of yours and maybe I do. Well, I mean, something, often, I mean, this might be ADHD also, but like if I take something out of the dryer and drop it on the ground, I'm like, ah, ah, yeah. Like I've gotten better, like I used to just like throw it back in the wash. I'd be like, I'm not gonna, and then I said, you know, I'll sock on the ground for four seconds. It's not even four seconds. It's probably not dirty still, but just so that kind of thing would be like me go, ah, yeah, yeah. But then I get a few weird ones where like, I'll get like a, I'm not like a basket case on this, but like one that I've had a few times lately is where I'll be in a store and I'll want to know what something costs, even though if I'm not interested in like, to see something that doesn't have a price tag and drives me crazy, they don't have a price tag. You look at every size tag to see if any of them have a price tag. I've done that before. Will you then like demand to know how much it costs? No, no, no.  You don't have to go home. Go home? Like you don't have to like, yeah, I don't have any OCDs. Like I'm trying to think of, feel like maybe I'm forgetting one, but I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't know. I have them with numbers a little bit, things that are numerical, just like, I remember I did a movie and the guy was telling me that. Todd Berry's in the wrestler, by the very good wrestler. What's the matter today? Raise the price of tights? I did one of my movies, I can't remember which one, but I, but I remembered the guy was explaining what they were paying for like, I don't know, per diem or something. And I was like, it wasn't quiet like on this day, you get it, and I really was like asking a lot of questions about it because it was driving me crazy. Yeah. Not that I was like, it's all like I was being ripped off or anything. I'd be more apt to think I was being ripped off. Yeah.   But you were, and it's not like about the $55. Right.  I don't have a bagel for that much. I mean, please. But yeah, I don't, yeah, I have the, I don't think I have any OCDs. Trying to think of any other fun ones. Yeah. I mean, there's times, I'll just get compulsion to buy something that I don't really want. And can't think of an example, but. Ruminating, help me. Help me with ruminating. You have that? My life is one long rumination. It's ruined. I mean, who knows what I could have been in life if I weren't still arguing with people for, I'm arguing with, if we get into an argument, it's never over. I'll be on my best behavior. Well, no, I mean, honestly, it's like, it's over, but I rarely do I forget. And again, yeah. And sometimes it is vengeful and petty. Other times it's just like, if I don't understand it, or if I feel like it's unresolved and it often feels unresolved, I will argue. I've made the joke before. My goal, it's me and Chappelle's mutual goal. My goal is on his deathbed, his final thought is, Neil was right. Like that and vice versa. Like I, there are people in my life that it's an ongoing like, no. Just cause they wronged you and never came clean or never apologized. Or they wronged, not even wronged. It's just, sometimes it's like wronged is probably too strong a word. Just a different, like with Dave, it's just like a, it's like a difference of, I don't even know what I'd want him to think I'm right about everything basically, but I'm in the middle one right now. Let's hear it. I can't. I can't do it. I can't do it. But I'm, it's emails Friday. We're recording this on Monday. Email with somebody Thursday, Friday and I'm still pouring over it in my head. Yeah. I heard someone say something recently where they're talking about disagreeing with him. Sometimes it's just all right to let someone be wrong. I thought that was an interesting, I mean, you don't always want someone to be wrong cause wrong could be a lot of things. Wrong could be murdering someone. But sometimes it's just like, what am I, yeah, just, I don't think, you're never going to convince them. Right. So let them have this. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of something to think about, but I ruminate, I often, it's usually something I wish I had said, and then it's like, it's too late to, and my therapist would say, it's never too late, but I would disagree with her. Wait, it's never too late. Like if there's like, I'd tell him, I should have said something about this and, and then, well, you can still tell, you can still say something. It's like, yeah, I'm not, then you're like, so you're basically encouraging me to start an argument. Right.  Yeah. Going back to the restaurant and going like, there's another thing we didn't know about, but that, I mean, I ruminate over, yeah, missed opportunities of just saying something like, oh, I should have said that. Yeah. But the perfect thing to say. That's the French have of saying for it. I don't know what the, it's the wit of the staircase. It's a sprit de scala, I believe it's the poor French pronunciation, but they, clearly I've thought about a lot of this. I've looked it up.  Like they, it's a real issue. And I also had the, I'm obsessed with fairness, which might be a little autism. Somebody was telling me, I just understand literal things. Like, well, no, you said this, therefore it has to be this. And it's like, or we made this agreement, how could you possibly violate? Like, it just spins me out, like just gets me in like a, like the computer loop of like the bouncing ball. But I've had the thought recently, I can keep, I can stand in front of the restaurant and pick at it, or I can just go to a different restaurant. Right. But it's real hard to, for me to pack it in. Yeah, I mean, sometimes I mean, I think my therapist used this, something about, there's an expression about justice, people who are in the justice. I wish I remember what it was. What? Like there's a type of, like you're just justice obsessed person or something like that. Yeah, I'm upset. I really, Chappelle one time said, I've never met someone more obsessed with justice in you. I can't, I'm like, but it ends up becoming like emotional vigilanceism where I can't believe that person think that I need to correct it and I want, even when we end this, I have to, I have a phone call with a friend to talk about the thing I, the problem I'm having with somebody and to make sure my friend knows what happened and just like, this is a giant waste of human resources.  I've never, if you think- Just remind me when you said like, I'm sorry, you're on the deathbed, said you were right. Yeah. Like I'll have a dream where someone's going, yeah, man, I fucked. Yeah, you were right about that thing.  That's so fun. My dreams are, my dreams are literal and the most poorly written. I fucking, do you ever have good dreams? I never have good dreams. Never had a good dream in my life. I never, I don't know what, when people say sweet dreams, I've literally said, what are you talking about? I don't even know how that's, like, what do you mean? Sweet dreams. Like my grandfather was there. What do you, what?  Like, you know what I mean? Like there's no, so and so and yeah. It's all the, it's the Mitch Hedberg. I hate to dream cause dreaming takes energy. I lay down on a bed, it feels great. Next thing you know, I have to build a gold cart with my excellent lawyer. Just like dream logic of like, what, what, what is this? What is this nonsense? Yeah, I don't know. And I've looked up rumination a lot and no one seems to have a good remedy. There's a quick fix that I saw, I think on TikTok, which is, I mean, basically you start ruminating, you know, if you know in your heart that you're ruminating and you're not like, I need to really think about this, which just like, I've gone, sometimes I'll say to myself, you've given this enough energy. You know what I mean? Like for six months, you've been thinking about this one exchange you had with someone that you wish went differently. You, you can just move it along. Well, with the, you know, now the funny thing is, I haven't seen your newest hour, which is called... Domestic short hair. Domestic short hair. Came out today. Came out today. Congratulations. Thank you.  They are, yeah. I realized that at some point. I never thought of myself as a storyteller, but it's a lot of it is just like, this guy said something down to me. Yeah, let's take that down. Yeah. So it is a ruminant. It's like you made a good living off of rumination in a weird way. But the quick fix I heard was basically, it sounds overly simplistic, was basically do anything else. Like you find yourself rummaging, start singing a song. Interesting. Just snap yourself out of it basically. I mean, that's kind of easier said than done. Yeah. I mean, the other, the other thing that I've realized is like, all these things I'm ruminating about. I mean, some of it is does end up with it. You end up writing a joke. That happens sometimes.  You know what I mean? Like constant, I'm thankful for some of them just got retired.  Like, I just like, eh. But other ones are so endless that it's such a waste of my life.  You know, I don't go, hey, it's cool. With yourself. Yeah.  Right. I mean, not that I've had a lot of feuds or anything, but it's happened. Look. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I do need, I need help. It's probably the biggest area I need to help in. Wow. Of all, look, I have, look guys, I don't, not only do I cover blocks, I have them. Hey, did you like that? Did you like that? Yeah, did you like it though? You want more? Don't wanna work? Would rather watch videos of me grab assing with people.  This is like when the weatherman says there's a high pressure system coming in. Although I'm not really used to the green screen.


So, hello everybody. Welcome to yet another OTAN webinar. The topic today, let me go ahead and get to the next one, is using Remind to safely communicate with students. Now, of course, you can also use it to unsafely communicate with students, but that wouldn't be very wise. And so, Remind is a third-party app which appears to be okay for use with students in K-12 districts throughout the country and also with adult students. And in a nutshell, the reason is communications from the teacher to student phones are through this third-party service. And so, your own personal phone number is not viewed by the students. And in our district, we have restrictions against that type of communication. And I'm sure many districts do. So, this provides a way to use the ubiquitous cell phone and texting apps to speak with students. And I think people are beginning to realize, and I'm sure there's a lot of statistics out there which show, and probably anecdotally, you can verify this or not, but people respond to text messages faster than virtually any other type of communication outside of getting hit over the head with a baseball bat. And so, you get a text message, and maybe you don't actually answer, but you certainly look at your phone very quickly to see who is texting you. And so, the way this, another reason why this became especially important for us at the LA Unis USD is that we had done a pretty good job. And when students enroll in our classes, everybody provides a phone number. Not everybody provides. In fact, very few people provide an email address. And even though we were in the process of rolling out a division email addresses to our adult students, we have not finished that process. In fact, we were in the middle of doing that when the schools were closed. So, the best method most people have for reaching students, especially during this time, is through cell phones. And so, what this does is it not only allows you to make that first contact, but it also allows you to make additional contacts and provide, actually provide instruction through texting and text messages. So, that's what we're going to talk about today. So, the goal for this webinar is that you will be able to contact your adult education students using Remind and demonstrate a facility with basic features of the application. So, that's the basic goal. Go to Remind.com and actually sign up for an account and then start to use it to work with. So, go ahead. I'm going to presume that you've done that and that you're looking at something that looks like this, the Remind homepage, a very, very beautiful school somewhere in the world. And you've clicked on sign up. So, after having done that and you'll get these options, you can create an account from scratch, either by entering an email or a phone number, or if you already have a Google account, you can use your existing Google account to sign up as well. And as you notice by signing up, you do agree to their terms of service and privacy policy. All right. Now, what's going to happen is if you use an email to sign up, they're going to send you a four-digit code. If you use the phone number to sign up, they're going to text you that four-digit code and they're requesting that you confirm your account by entering that four-digit code. There's a question in the chat that I just happened to see which says, is it okay to use work email? This is the type of thing that there could be different responses. Remind, it doesn't matter to remind which email you use. It may matter to your work, but if you're going to use this for work, which I presume you will be, there should be no reason why you can't use it for your work email or use your work email for this purpose. Sometimes I'm careful about what I sign up for using a work email because in our district, when you retire, it's like they cut off your email before you leave the office after turning in your papers. So there may be some things that you want to keep using. You may decide if that applies in your district not to use a work email because you may lose access to it when they separate you from employment. Okay, so hopefully you've done that and if you signed up with a phone number, there may be an extra step in that because you signed up with a phone number, they also want you to tell them what email address you'll be using. So you may get a secondary step there if you signed up with a phone number. Jorge asks if there's a difference between signing up with your phone number or email and I cannot really answer that, but I don't think that, I don't think they would see that as a difference. You know, to them it's probably all the same. Let's see, how is this app different from and or better than creating a Google voice phone number and using that to communicate with students? I don't actually know the answer to that. I don't know what the privacy concerns are as related to Google voice and phone. I do know that Remind integrates well with some other common programs. I'm not sure how Google voice does. I think I'm going to leave that something for those of you who are experts in using Google voice to experiment with and the other one, what can you tell us about their terms of service? Does the app have access to a phone's contacts calendar, etc. So that is an interesting question. Again, I'm not completely familiar with all the ramifications of that. There is an app. Students do not need the app. You may want the app so that you can respond and create and send messages as the teacher of a class or classes but students don't need it. I imagine that they'll want something. For example, if you like to send a photo of something to your teacher, to your students, then it would ask you for access to your photos. When there's one more question, when I try to reset my password, I never get the email to reset it. A common suggestion is check your spam folder. Sometimes emails like that get bumped to a spam mailbox. Okay, so let's see. So again, my information is that they're going to send you a four-digit code but if you get a different number, go ahead and enter that. After you do that and perhaps they ask for your email address if you didn't sign up, they do want you to enter your name and create a password. Okay, so hopefully you have done that as well and then there's a user agreement which they require you to accept. If you decline it, I imagine that you won't be able to use Remind. And then they ask you, tell us about yourself. See, so if you said I'm a teacher at that screen, I don't think it would ask you to sign up again as a teacher. But again, this is the way it looks like on a desktop. This process may look different if you're doing it on a cell phone. The very, very first time that you do sign up, if that's what you're doing, it's going to go right ahead and ask you to create a class. If you already have an account and you're just logging in again, it won't ask you that. It would just go to your home page. So this is where you get a chance to actually give a title to a class that you're teaching. Obviously you want to try to make it as clear as you can. I like to put the time of the class as well as the title and you can also include your name to make it really, really clear. Okay. So in any case, notice they do have the, I think it's the SIPA rules. I'm not sure if I'm quoting the right acronym, but I know about people under 13. It is okay, but then they get the parent's email involved. Okay, so this is sometimes the issue for some people. They want to identify a school, and I think they've done a pretty good job of listing huge numbers of schools, but I think what they do is they just try to match you up with an existing school here. So you may try alternative names for your school or for your district, but I do think that there's all, if they actually don't find your school, then there's also an option to say this, I don't see my school. And then of course, at the very bottom there, it also says, I don't work at a school. So that could also be a legitimate option. So we've got a few more slides to go for the signup process. So you can see I work at a school called North Valley Occupational Center. There was, there's also in our division, a West Valley Occupational Center. So, you know, when I was adding the school, it popped up in that fashion. Most of us know our school by the initials, and I did that the first time, and it didn't recognize us. But when I started typing out the name, it did find us. So you want to go ahead and do that. Okay. And finally, when you select the school, you click on Save. And if you've done that correctly, then right away, you go to that page of your brand new class. And it will say, add people. So let me speak to this a little bit. There are different ways to add people into your brand new class. And notice that one of the first things it mentions, it says, enter context or copy and paste from a spreadsheet. And I noticed in the comments, some of you did try to copy and paste from Excel, but it didn't quite work out. And so you may have to experiment with comma separated values, sheets, and find out where the comma will go to make it, if you're copying and pasting. So you may want to try to do that a few times. I think if you have the name, whether or not you do it last name, first name, or first name, last name, and then in a separate column, the phone number, if you, I think if you use a CSV separated value, CSV file, it automatic, if the name and the, you want the name, first name, last name in one column, and then the phone number in a second column, and it automatically interprets that as being a comma between the two fields, and it should paste correctly. So we had, at our division, we had to experiment with that a little bit because of out of our student information system. Teachers can download a spreadsheet, but we did have to experiment with manipulating that spreadsheet in a way that a remind would recognize it, but it is doable. If you have a list, I think if you just do the student name and then a comma, and then the email, that would work as well. But you can also click on an individual row and manually enter student emails or phone numbers. So in the, that's one way. And if you notice on the left side, this page is called phone or email contacts. Now, let's say that you have entered the five or 10 or 15 names, what will happen as soon as you click on add people at the bottom of this page, a text message or email is actually sent to all of those people. And you may be surprised or you may not be, but even while you're doing that, you may start to get responses. And that's actually what happened when I was coaching an instructor through that process. Before we had even moved off of this page, he had started to get responses from students who had received his text message. So that was pretty cool. But I'm going to, before we move on to the website live, I want to talk about the other ways to add people to a course. So if you look on the left side, it says, the next slide says printable PDFs. Okay. So this is something that you could do if you're back in a classroom situation, and you have all of your class sitting there with their phones handy, you could actually print this out or, you know, project it up on the screen, perhaps, but just print this out and have it. So the way I would use this is, you know, after I, an initial, you know, attempt to get as many students in the class signed up on one day, then I would have several of these for students who were absent. And I had trained other students to help the newer students go through this process so that anytime I got a new student, there was, you know, they have this page of rules or instructions, and then they could use that. So that's, you know, save that for, you know, sometime in the future, if and when we return to classrooms. So this next one says in-person instructions. Okay. And this would actually be better if you are trying to do it in front of the class with the projector. It's much simpler. Okay. And so what I thought we would actually do, you could try this right now to see how well this works. This is an experiment. I haven't actually done this in a live webinar yet. So I'm hoping it will work well. This is an actual class that I set up for, you know, doing trainings. And the code for this class is at easy code for you. And when we get to the point about settings, I will show you how to change the computer generated or the remind generated code to an easy code that may be easier for your students. So the name of this class you see up in the upper left is called practice with remind. And the code for this class is easy code for you. And so what the student or what you are to do if you so desire for the purpose of this webinar is you're going to text the text message at easy code for you to a number 81010. So getting out your cell phone if you want to participate, go to your text message program. And in the to field, you type the number 81010. And then as the body of the message, you type at easy code for you. What's happening now is that on my own cell phone, I am receiving text messages from remind from many, many people or let's say several people at this point who are joining the class. So that's a good thing. Okay, so again, go ahead continue to join the class using this method. Do note, and this was something that I did find some cell phones could not make use of this short code 81010. And I don't know if there was probably more the cell phone provider than the actual cell phone. But some providers did not like this short of cut method. So in that case, you can see the actual phone number, the<PHONE_NUMBER> phone number. And it does the same thing. And phones seem to like that better than some phone or some providers seem to like that better than the short five digit code. While you continue to sign up and thank you for doing that, it will make some of the demonstrations later also more relevant because we can actually send messages and things to people who are actually in this class. Okay, so the next one, the last way to share information is to share a link. So on the left side, if you click on the share a link menu item, what you actually see is a link that can be copied and then dropped into an email if you have an email or posted on a website or a web page that people can then use that link to join. Before we go live, let me take a step back and talk about some of the account settings that you may find useful. And you find this menu to the upper left of the screen under your name. You click on the down arrow and you'll see the menu account settings. So as part of the menu, the one that stands out right away, notification preferences. So on this screen, you have the opportunity to decide which actual email you're going to use or which actual phone number and whether or not you want to enable notifications like on your desktop computer or not, or you can add other devices. So this may be something it does mention. There's a convenient button there to tell you about downloading the mobile app if you want to go that path or not. I have highlighted here at the very bottom, turn on office hours. That may be nice. What it does is it allows you to sort of set office hours when you're going to get messages. But notice that even though they'll get like a warning message, they can still send the message. So it will say, you know what, are you really sure you want to send this message to your teacher at 5 a.m.? So it does give them the option, yeah, I do want to send this message to my teacher at 5 a.m. But I think what they're saying there is, you're not obligated to answer it at 5 a.m. And then right above that, the other thing that you may want to think about is do you want to allow replies to your messages? You can make this a one-way system where you're just pushing out the messages and the information and not bother with replies. So you can decide whether or not that would be something that you'd want to do. Okay, so at this point, what I was going to do was go directly to my Remind website. So this is my account and go through some of the other features. So again, this is my Remind website. This is the add people page for practice with Remind, which is the name of this class. So for the moment, I'm done adding people. When I click on close, okay, we go back to the page for this class. So at the top, you'll see four different tabs. Let me go through them. So this is like a log of all the messages. And right away, you can see that lots of people, the primary message says, you know, this person joined the class. So that basically only happens once.  And that's an actual message. So not only did they join the class, they actually typed a message. Now, over here on the left, you actually see that in this class, there are eight new messages that have not been responded to. Okay, so what I can do is I can click on that one message from that one person. I'm just going to say, say back, hello, and welcome. So and you can do this with your students.  So again, you can go down and look at the list of messages, click on a message and respond. Okay. And so this is where you keep track of the messages for this class. And it may be helpful for those of you who didn't go through this process to just spend a minute to talk about what you saw.  Okay. But your teacher is like asking you to join the class. And then, you know, when you want to join the class, basically, you say yes. And then it asks you, well, what's your full name? And so the student writes the name. And then it also asks them to decide if they're a student or a parent. Okay. And for adult students, this is sometimes confusing because they're both. And it doesn't really matter. In other situations in K-12, you know, it does matter a little bit because they differentiate between K-12 students and their parents. And when we get into the settings, there is a setting which prevents, if you want, like students from, you know, or people from communicating with anybody outside of their role. And so if it's the person is the parent, you can block them from speaking or sending a text message directly to a student and vice versa. Now, it may be true that some of you who already have a Remind accounts in the past and which you signed up for as teachers when you come in to this new classroom, or if you signed up just now, Remind automatically identifies you as a teacher. So in any case, this is the sending the message page. Over here under files, pretty much, this is what it says, all of the files that you shared to your class will appear here. So if you want to send out like a Word document, you know, it would say send a file and then you can go through that process. We can try that later. Okay. People, that was the page we were already at. Under this view, you see a list of all the people who have joined the class. Okay. If you want to add more, then on the upper right, you select add people. And then the settings page. And we'll get into that next, but that's where you would change the settings. But let's go back to the messages page and look at some of our options. So the message, the the send a message text boxes at the bottom right, and the default is message everyone in the class. So message everyone in practice with Remind. So, you know, basically, just the click, the very first message just says welcome to practice with Remind. Welcome to the class. I'm looking forward to using Remind to share updates, notes and more. Thanks for joining. So the key thing here is on the right, it says minus six. And so I think that means there's too many characters. So let's see what happens if we delete some characters. Okay. So at this point, if I click send, everybody who's joined the class should now get that message. So let's see what happened. Okay. So I got a message that said message was sent. And right away, it goes back to the message screen. And it tells me that this was the message that I sent. And I sent it to everyone. So that means that all of you right now should be receiving another text message. Now, notice that you may also, you know, who does that message come from? It still comes from that number that you don't know. So at this point, you may want to suggest to your students that they save this number in their own phone books as a message from their favorite teacher. See, so that way, you know, they know that that's the, that message that's coming in, that text message is actually coming from you and not from some strange number. So they could say, you know, text messages from Mr. Bakin. Okay. All right. So that's one thing to do with sending messages to everyone. You will notice at the bottom that there are a few other things that you can do. Here's a photo. I just say, please write a sentence about this photo. So, you know, and of course, that's an ESL type instruction. You know, you're probably all teaching different things. But see, right away, there's the attachments add to your message. Okay. And so let's say upload a photo or video. And so, you know, you do want to find your, the particular item that you wanted. So here's some photos. I'm going to, I select a photo and it takes a few seconds for it to load into the, into the message. Okay. And then I could send that. But instead of just sending it out randomly, here's a cool little feature, which could be useful for some of you, the translate feature. And they give you this little menu. Let's see. So for example, if you wanted to translate into another language, it automatically does it for you. Tinoosh, can you verify if their translation is decent? Yes, it is. Okay, let's do a Russian version. Russian. Okay. So Polina, how's the automatic translation? It looks okay. See, isn't that great? And again, you know, in an ESL class, you know, obviously our goal is to do more, you know, native, you know, English language, but there could certainly be some times when, you know, you may want to make use of this feature. You know, we're, again, back in our division, we're trying to get students to activate their school district emails and it is a convoluted process. And so it may be very convenient to be able to do something like this. And anyway, to get back to English, I'll go back to English. So here's a picture. Please write an offer. I don't remember. Please write a sentence. Oh, you know what? I bet you that was the reverse translation. In Portuguese or something, it must have had a different word. So translating back from Portuguese to English, please write a sentence about this photo. Okay. So that's one option. You guys can, I'm going to send everybody in the class a picture now of one of the schools I work at, East Valley Skills Center. Let's see how that's working. And there you go. And then again, you see the picture and the, of what was sent out as a text message. Okay. Notice, so this is the message that I sent. If you click on that little arrow to the right, this is a little bit of a digression.  So 93%, well, let's say 100% of the people in this class got the message and 93% actually looked at it. So that can be very helpful to know, like, are they paying attention to what I'm sending them? Because at least, you know, here, I know that 42 of you out of 45 actually opened the message and saw it. That's pretty cool. So you can know, well, did they, did they never see it? Or did they see it and simply ignore it? Okay. Let's look at some of these other ones. Can I translate into English a message a student sends to me in their native language? I don't know. I don't know if that's possible within remind, but you could certainly copy and paste. Okay. Does a student need to download the app to receive and send messages? No. They're just, for them, they're just text messages. Can I, okay. So some names were automatically added that are not part of my class. They are from the local high school. Okay. So I guess your district has an account. And so some people were added to your class. Let's take a look. Let's just get out of the questions for a second. So if I go to people, okay.  So let's say if I click on O-10 techie, I get this little menu. Can everybody see that? And so on the right side, this is that person. Okay. So there's more actions. And if I click on more actions, I have one removed from class, which would boot O-10 techie out of this class. Block user. I'm not actually sure, you know, the ramifications of that. But I don't know if it just blocks users from me or from remind totally. That would be a good question for remind. And then boy, report to remind. Gee, I'm tempted to do that. That O-10 techie is probably some spam account. That's what, if you ask me. But anyway, that's what you could do. Okay. Let's get back to the Q&A real quickly. Can students send images and videos to the group? I don't, I think so. But I'm not going to promise you that they can. Of course, you know, you would, before doing something like that, you'd want to remind everybody that everything that they do can be viewed by you. And so, you know, they should be aware of that.  Okay. Jesse, you say that window isn't what I have. Nothing on the right. Okay. I can text everybody but can't access that column. Let me go back to the messages. Okay. So, at the very bottom in your message bar where it says message everyone in practice with remind to the right that Jesse, do you see the camera and the paper clip? If you click on the paper clip, then you get that message bar. You get this window where you can add other things. If you just start typing, let's see. Well, it doesn't even let me just start typing. So, it pops up. But this may be a good opportunity before we go back to the question and answer. So, we chose to upload a photo or video. You can also, at this time, just upload a file. So, it opens up your file explorer and you can select the file. Notice that it links to Google Drive. So, if you click on Google Drive, and I most likely the very first time that you do this, it's going to ask you for permission to link to your Google Drive and you probably have to sign in to your Google Drive with your password. But right here, you have a list of your most recent files. And so, you can attach that whatever that file is automatically through this attachment system. So, if I want my students to read my weekly update, I can just click on it and it will appear in the message. Now, notice it is also a link, or it appears as a link. And so, I would imagine that you'd have to make sure before you do that you set the permissions on your Google Drive so that people can view it. You can get rid of it by clicking on the X. But if you go back to that menu, you may use some of these other third-party services. The first time you see it's got the little plus symbol, which means you probably have to give it permission. But some of you, if you're using Google Forms for quizzes or for assessments, you could do that through Google Drive. Some of you may be familiar with SurveyMonkey. So, if you're using SurveyMonkey, it very conveniently looks for your most recent surveys and you could attach those. So, that's pretty convenient. So, those are the attachments. Now, the other thing is, notice here your character count. So, in your messages to the whole class, you are limited to 140 characters and it counts it down. As you start typing, the characters count down. There are some workarounds if you want to send a message with a greater number of characters. So, one of those is, you know, you write your message as a document and then you attach the document. Okay, but another nice little workaround is you can send, you can divide your class into groups. So, to do that, and then they don't have that same message limit, character limit. So, the pencil icon near the top allows you to set up your message in general. So, notice it's this, if you write a message this way, it's not limited to the practice with remind course. I could actually send the same message to multiple courses. See, and then they have this other section called group conversations. Okay, so I made a group of just me and myself in the past to practice it. So, it remembers it. So, that way, if you have like a, you know, a team of people working on a project, you know, and you create a group just for that team, then it's easy to come back to that team. But you can also select create new and it says start the dialogue with up to nine other people. So, you could go through the list and pick any, you know, pick any nine. Okay. And then create a new group. Okay. So, there's the new group. And then you continue to write a message to that group. And then notice now, the character limit is significantly higher. You can, you know, your message can be much, much longer. 1500 characters. So, that could be a workaround if you find that you're, you know, 140 characters doesn't, you know, isn't sufficient. Let's go back to the Q&A and see if I got everything. Do I need to invite them again to join remind? Could it be that they deleted the app if they got it? I'm not exactly sure what the setup is for that. The students were, they all started using remind and like a month into it, everybody stopped responding or only one or two responds still. Oh, well, I do not know what the reason for that would be. You know, maybe they're no longer interested in participating and there's nobody to enforce that. You know, what can I say? Or maybe they changed their phone numbers. But maybe, you know, take a look at the, remember we said over here, oops, this right arrow, let's say you have a message, then to the right, you can see how many people read the message compared to how it was delivered. So that could help. But I don't, I don't know that, you know, if they're using the app, then I think it would still go to their, just their text messaging. Bev asked how many people are allowed in a group. I think it was nine. Okay. Is there a way to keep students from seeing each other or to keep their names confidential? Sign up with a different name that I don't know. Okay, does attaching a file or photo use remind message space? It does not appear to affect the number of characters. How can you add content without using space in the message? Okay, so again, just try one. Okay, so here's my message. I'm going to say test message. And I'm down to 128 characters. If I upload a file, here's a Word document. I'll open it. And it may take time for documents, oops, to load. But it did, it did look like it dropped my characters down to 105. But I, that doesn't seem to be, need to be significant. But again, if you have any concerns about that, I would say, you know, divide your classes up into groups. Okay, let's get back to the Q&A. And how do I send a picture from my phone to my remind file? The file is linked to my computer, not my phone number. Um, I would, you know, maybe just send the phone to your email.  That would probably be one workaround. Or you, you know, upload the picture to your Google Drive or some other cloud service and send it from there. Let's look at a few more of the settings. So right here, notice the class name was practice with remind, but you can go right in and change it if you want to, you know, more practice with remind. But this next section is where you change the class code. So if in your class, it's got one of those, you know, three digits and then a letter and then for more digits, you just click in the box and change it. But notice they have one of these artificial intelligence type things that says oops, this one is unavailable. Okay. So they give you some suggestions or you just keep typing until it makes sense. And then notice, let's say I'll do easy code, you know, 10.  Are you sure? Current participants won't be affected because you're already in, but new participants must use this code to join your class so you can accept or not. Okay. Then there's the name of the school that this one is associated with and they give you a little reminder here. This school doesn't have a remind plan, which I'm sure costs money and your school may or may not wish to spend money, but you can still notice it tells me how many more classes I have. You can create five more classes with your free account. So if you, so I already have one, two, three, four, five, so it looks like they give you up to 10 classes. As we go down though, I'm just going to skip right by this next part because at the very bottom, it says archiving reuse class code. So you can archive this class and create a new class with the same class code. So if you really like that easy code for you, you could keep it. You can also just remove the class and it no longer appears in your class list. So I have over here on the left side. So remember, I have five more classes. If I go to this other practice class called technology workshop, okay, and I go to settings. See, and I go down and I say archive the class. Are you sure I'm going to remove it because I don't need it. Now I'll go back to my practice with remind class, go back to settings. And if the magic worked, see now I have six more classes that I can create by archiving a class that I didn't really need. Okay. Some other settings, class visibility, this class will appear in class search and on your profile. So on is fine. Require approval to join. Notice it does say anyone added by your school will be approved automatically. That may have related to the other issue of the person who said that they had students in their class that they don't know where they came from. Okay. Participant messaging. Okay. So this is where you can choose how the participants see and message others in the class. So the default is role based, meaning students can only message students, parents can only message parents. So, you know, in my class, you know, typically we don't have that type of combination. So I just say all participants in the class can message each other. For the one participant who asked about not seeing the other people, you may want to select off and that way they can only message the class owners and can't see others in the class. So that may be the solution there. And then by default, I will only message people 13 or older presuming that most of us are working in an adult school. I think that's safe to keep. Class owners can see and send messages to class participants. Once somebody becomes a class owner, they cannot be removed. So be careful who you welcome to your little club. Okay, let me drop back in now to the Q&A and the chat. Okay. So the question is, so when a student graduates and leaves my class, can I still keep them in a list for the communication to continue? Or should I place them in a group so they do not get assignments, just info or greetings? I'm not actually sure. Perhaps you can, if you have extra classes, you could create a class called, you know, former students. And then you put all of the, those students into that group. And then if you remember, when we were looking at an individual student name, click on the student name, you get this other little menu on the side. Well, let's see, let's see, view profile. There was a way to, oh, add to another class. See, so you can switch them to the new class that you've made on your own. Okay, so that's what's messaging. The last thing that we should cover is this create a class. Okay, so again, you know, when you join, you created your first class. Okay, so now we're going to, you know, you need to create a new class.  Okay, there, oh, that, that's a very difficult class code. So I'm going to just say tech for you. No, okay, I like that. Okay. And then notice that you didn't let you type too many, the class code can't be too long. Well, this is this school. I'll change it over to North Valley Occupational Center. Okay, yes. And I create my, oh, I guess I, oh, you know, maybe when I switched classes, it erased the class name. So tech talks. Okay. And I'll create it. Okay, so there you go. Right now, I don't have any members in the class. You know how to add members, click on people. And click on add people. And then you have the four methods. Okay, adding from the spreadsheet, you can type a name. Okay. Oops, sorry. That would be the phone number. And then boom, add the people and they get a phone number. They get a text message. Okay. When you're done with that, you can close it. Okay. And so you have the same thing. But now there's a new class here, tech talks. It's pretty simple. So we're almost at the end of today's webinar. The only other thing that I would say, if you click under your name, the help center is very helpful. So they've got a lot of, you know, they have an FAQ. You can chat with a computer. They have other resources. And so if you will finish the class for this school year, do I need to keep the class with the same students? I think that we saw that you can archive. And that way it just, you know, it doesn't, you know, you're not worried about it. I entered in about 40 names. Let's say 10 do not respond. I will need to add or invite them again. There is no place to access the students I invited but did not accept. Well, let's see. Let's go back to that. Okay. So you added people. I think that, for example, if you, you know, you would just want to keep a record of the ones that you requested and, you know, just keep a spreadsheet and then you can compare the spreadsheet with who's actually in the class. But I do not know if there's a way to see that from within Remind. Okay. So can you remind us cute how it will work when we send the class code to students by way of email? I think, okay. So if you send it by way of email, they probably would click on a link in a browser and then it would ask them to join the class. But I'm not actually sure because I've always done it with phone numbers. Okay. Let's see if there's anything in the chat box that needs to be reviewed. Yeah. So it doesn't seem to be a way to see who are potentially, I would say, you know, work off of your own spreadsheet or take screenshots. Located remind messages can be edited or deleted once they've been sent. This is similar to other text emails and messages you send. Although participants can delete text from their phones, these messages will still appear in the remind message history. That's great advice. And just like when you are working on your phone with, you know, a couple of people who you're texting using your text messaging, and then you've got somebody else on Messenger, and then maybe you have somebody on WhatsApp, you know, it's pretty much a good idea nowadays to double check before you click send that you're sending that message to the correct people. You can avoid a lot of embarrassment that way. Okay. Okay. Let's see. So Polina says, when I invite people, I usually type in the name and the phone number that is on the roster I have access to through this school. Okay. So again, that's sort of your, you know, keeping track in your own fashion.


Welkom everyone to this session at Functional Conf for 2022. We are really excited to have Jed Wesley-Smith with us. He is going to be talking about names are overrated. So we're looking forward to hearing about that and having some fun with names. Thanks very much for the lovely introduction. G'day everyone, my name is Jed Wesley-Smith. I'm very pleased and honoured to be presenting at Functional Conf this year. It's unfortunate it couldn't be there. It's about 15 years since I was last in India and would have loved to have been back. But this is a pleasure anyway. Our talk today is about names, about why we name things, how we name things and what are some of the things that we should really think about when naming things. So called names are overrated, previously called names don't matter. But that's possibly a fairly controversial thing for most people to say. So we'll call it names are overrated. And of course as programmers we all know how important naming things well is. Naming things poorly can have some really difficult consequences. And I think we've all had projects where we've had sort of bad names. I certainly had a project where the names were all things after native Australian birds and no one ever really knew if they needed a cookaburra, a pardalote or a magpie goose. It was a complete disaster. And we know that we should call our variables verbose and descriptive names. And so for instance A and B are really poor names for concrete things like taxable amount and tax rate. This let's say equals A times B is ambiguous in meaning compared to let the tax amount be the sale amount times the tax rate. This is fairly unambiguous and it's obviously better. So as programmers we tend to think and spend an enormous amount of time arguing and talking about names more possibly than anything else. And we're constantly searching for that perfect name. The idea that we programmers are uniquely gifted with the ability to decide and prescribe the one true name that something should be called. And that we really are the best at doing it. And of course there's actually a name for this. It's hubris. There isn't really such a thing as an objectively correct name. It's all subjective. So we should probably define some terms. What is a name? Well basically a name is a word or a set of words by which a person or a thing is known or how we address or refer to it. And a word is basically just a unit of language which consists of one or more sounds or their written representation. And this functions as a principal carrier of meaning. So Juliet Capulet is in love with a young Romeo Montague while her family the Capulets and the Montagues are in a deadly feud asks what is Montague? It isn't hand nor foot nor arm nor face nor any other part belonging to a man. Oh be some other man. No other name. What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection which he owns without that title. So what's the purpose of a name? Well really a name is just a compression scheme for communication. So complex objects, thoughts and ideas are assigned identifiers so that we can easily and succinctly refer to them. And names or identifying sounds aren't even unique to humans. They probably predate us by well over 100 million years. Many animals use specific threat identification sounds. So for instance they'll have different ones for a snake or a cat or a predatory bird. And there's no reason to presume that this identification doesn't go at least back to the time of the dinosaurs. So what is a principal carrier of meaning? So words carry meaning based on the shared understanding between two communicating parties. And without that shared understanding the name is meaningless. If I use a name that you're not aware of then it's essentially, it is completely useless. And yet the actual grouping of sounds is totally arbitrary. The meaning is built by usage. The essence of the object isn't affected by any specific representation. And for any name we must learn what it means. And indeed we introduce ourselves by telling each other our names. When I've met you I don't know your name and then I learn that name. But our usage of words is nevertheless very imprecise. We use synonyms. So we have multiple words that essentially referring to the same thing. And we overload words. So the same word can mean different things maybe in different contexts or we just have some kind of understanding of it. We also speak multiple languages. And each language has its entire own dictionary. Usually with a complete set of different words to mean the same things and entirely often different grammatical and morphological themes. And ultimately all these words are just an association of the sounds to the actual meaning. And if a word is merely an association can the actual meaning be referenced in a more stable or canonical form? And this is a really interesting idea. Is there a way that as programmers in particular we could actually have something that's better than words? Now every community has jargon. So we have special words that are only meaningful within that community. And that's a little localised compression scheme. And if you're going to join a community then you need to learn that community's jargon. Whether it's acronyms or specific words that are unique to that particular industry or that particular company. And most technical communities have extensive jargon dictionaries. And a lot of the time different jargons have different names for the same thing. So you're going to work in finance and they have a whole bunch of names for things which when you look at it really are the same as the kinds of things that are a different kind of company. But they're just called different things. So names really have what's known as the network effect. The network effect is essentially that a telephone that is unconnected to any other is really just a decorative sculpture. It's indistinguishable in its actual form from a brick. The telephone gains its initial value when it's connected to another one. And every other phone that's connected to the network increases the value of your phone. Similarly, names gain value by being shared. And a good name is a name that's widely known. They're familiar both to the speaker and the intended audience. And the process of becoming known is called making a name for oneself. So if I tell you a story about Fred, your interest is going to depend on a lot on whether you know Fred or not unless it's a great story and Fred's just a good character. Similarly, if I name something using some metaphor or analogy its value is entirely dependent on whether you happen to know the concept that you're referring to. So unfamiliarity is an interesting psychological thing for people to deal with. When we encounter the unfamiliar we are challenged and made to feel quite distinctly uncomfortable. The challenge comes at quite a deep psychological level. It triggers a fight or flight mechanism which has its origins deep in the heart of the brain in a place called the hippocampus. So when people are confronted with the unfamiliar they tend to react quite negatively. And programmers, particularly senior ones are used to being in a familiar world and so they're often suspicious of and reject the unfamiliar. The concepts we know and use are good and we've done pretty well without all the other stuff. Thanks very much. And this is also known as the blob paradox. The blob paradox refers to the mythical middle of the road language called blob. And blob programmers, especially senior ones are extremely comfortable in blob land. They know that blob is superior to lesser tools. They're happy to use all of the features. They know they don't need superior tools because, hey, they can do everything in blob. They tend to think in blob and blob is all they need. So let's talk about names. What do names matter to programmers? Well, it's really about not necessarily about what we tell the computer to do but can we tell other people about what we want the computer to do. And, of course, we've got to get things right. So we're constantly searching for better names to describe a particular unit. Names that really give the reader some innate sense of what something does and will often lean heavily on metaphor. And the problem is that many of the abstractions that we've traditionally built are fairly informally or poorly specified. Just ad hoc collections of data and functionality. And partly that's because a lot of the tools that we've been using lack the abstraction power to make them sufficiently general and reusable and usable. And so consequently, we've generally only had the ability to name things and documentation. And in many programming contexts, names are all you've got. So, when we're searching for something, we often reach for paroxynonyms. With the idea being that well, programmers already basically know everything. And if we can only find the right metaphor to tease out that existing knowledge, then they'll understand this particular bit of code. And what happens then is every language in every library provides different names based on what they think will be something that someone will understand. This brings us to this, which is known as BIND in Haskell. This is the standard monadic combinator. And Haskell brought it to programming via... Now, Martin Oderski didn't like BIND, so he created a name which was based on the composition of MAP and Flatten, which to the great annoyance of Haskell programmers, which might have been partly the point. Java's completion stage introduced then-compose, then-compose async. I don't know if Doug Lee really knew about or cared about the generic composition patterns. He just added useful combinators and they happened to be the same as BIND. It's called Select Many in C-sharp's link. Eric Mayer definitely knew all about monads and he explicitly wanted to hide those scary words from C-sharp programmers and use the existing jargon of SQL. JavaScript promises have then and the ECMAScript proposal proposed smush map because someone had already taken Flatten map. But these are almost all the same thing. Well, how do we know? We look at the type and it simply says that, given this definition, where for all types A and B for some monad of the higher kind of type M, we're given an M of A and a function from A to M of B, we can produce an M of B and all of the preceding things essentially all accord to that. And really it's the same concept, sequential composition of two effects. And the type and the laws are really the important identifying feature. Here's a function. It's called FRED. It says for all A, given an A, return an A. If we believe this hypothesis that fast and loose reasoning is morally correct and we already know this function must be the same as definitely not FRED, even though the name might lead you astray here. This is also known as, of course, the identity function. Similarly, given a function, oh my god, which says for all A, given a list of As, return a list of As, well, the function's signature's not enough to tell us about its implementation, but we can still tell a lot about it. For instance, we know that all elements in the result were definitely present in the argument because you can't just make up As. If we had a law that says for all A and a list of As, or two lists of As, if we, oh my god, the Bs appended to Cs, that's exactly the same as omagodding Cs and then appending that to omagodding Bs. And now we know precisely what this function does. It's reverse. Similarly, we can replace letters with symbols and we say that, given some spanner function that says for all bathtubs, given two bathtubs, return me another bathtub, we can say that for all crocodile, horse, and cow, we can spanner a crocodile and a horse and then spanner that with a cow and that is the same as spannering a crocodile with spannering a horse and cow. And we can fairly easily see that this is really a semi-group. We don't need any literal names for this. And we can take this a bit further and have a burrito class, which, if you squint, not very hard, you'll see is basically obviously monad. So, we'll talk quickly about hard names nearly out of time. Program is often balk at difficult names, particularly the mathematics ones, because really we all decided, well, maths people are just not very good at naming things. But really the problem is that these are unfamiliar names. And we're, as we said, hardwired to be fearful of unfamiliar things, especially if they're not easy. And many attempts to rename them try to tie them to something familiar. And that often only partially captures what they do. So, for instance, many people coming across monoids for the first time propose alternate names such as appendable or addable. And, you know, that superficially seems like it's a good idea. Monoid exposes the operation called plus, which addition is a standard example. But this operation is also shared with semi-group. So, which one is really addable? And if we're looking at addition, that also gives rise to negation or inversion, which isn't shared amongst all monoid instances. So perhaps we should really rename group to addable, except addition also admits multiplication. So maybe ring is the thing that should be renamed. Right? Addition is only a very specialised instance. So, and semi-group, monoid, group and ring are all far more specific and accurate names. I'm going to get through quickly. And of course, if we use the original names, then there's a whole set of existing literature that we can use, which is much harder to access if we rename everything. Ed Camett talks about how using the proper names or the pre-existing names has allowed others to show him how he's using them wrong or potentially additional features that he could add. And the Twitter bijection library inspired much comment because they didn't have the correct definition of bijection. And that actually led to material improvements in the library which helped everybody. Of course Java loves a good name and Spring has some of the best. Things like abstract annotation, config dispatcher, handler initialiser, which of course clearly tells you everything about what it does. It's actually been renamed to abstract reactive web initialiser. And really it's just a Java-binified tuple of application context in a class array. Some more fun with Spring. Some of these. And these are all real Spring names that you clearly know everything about just from its name. OK. So the question is, do names matter? Well, what matters is if you change it, is there a material difference? We can add multiple names to things without changing their meaning and we can refactor the name of thing without actually making any material change to the program. So I don't believe that is an actual material difference. So under that definition, names don't matter. But if we change types and laws, then we definitely change the meaning and behaviour of the program. If they don't matter, does this mean we're free to rename anything to any silly name? No, of course not. It really means that the specific word chosen isn't the important factor. It means changing well existing understood names doesn't necessarily help. So basically we should choose the ergonomic factors we care about in the names we use. Names that already have a precise meaning should be preferred to new made up names. And names that already have precise meaning should be avoided for only tangentially related concepts. Isomorphic JavaScript has got nothing to do with isomorphism. And stability of identifiers is important. It can tie multiple communities with the same concept. So naming new concepts is hard. So let's go to the pub and argue about them. I think I'll leave it there. Thank you very much everybody. I think I've run out of time for questions but we can... We've overrun a little bit but we can quickly look. There's one question there. So the question says from Kim Eo. The speaker assumes a platonic where all nouns are embedded immutably in the firmament. What can he say about names used provisionally as a tool to discover and incrementally emerge hidden half-seen and completely understood complex concepts. Did you get all of that? I don't entirely get it. A platonic universe. So this isn't to say that everything has an existing name or that we have the ability to say well everything already has a name. There are certainly things that we are discovering or inventing and we are of course in the privileged position of naming those things if they are genuinely new. My argument is simply that if there is an existing name giving it some name like burrito-like as opposed to the name monad is not necessarily doing anyone a favour. It might make more sense to you as the person who is naming it but you've now got a brand new name which has no shared understanding. You now have to teach that from scratch. You are the Unconnected Telephone. So, yeah, that's kind of the guts of what I'm trying to say. Well, one more question and then we'll take everything to the hangouts. Aaron says if ergonomics matter we might find that programmers are very bad at ergonomics. Yes or no? This is definitely true. These are usability things but we do at the same time spend a lot of time arguing and thinking about names and yes, I certainly agree that programmers are actually not very good at naming things. However, it's like planning. No plan survives contact with the enemy but planning is an extremely important thing to do regardless because it gives you some idea of where you're going. So, if you have at least some more tools in the kit bag to think about what you want for a name and if one of those things is is there an existing name, can we use that? I would hope that if all this talk does is give you that thought and say well, use the existing name because it's very good because people already know it and there's already a whole heap of stuff out there about what it does and what it is. All right, I'm going to sneak in one more question from Elliot Cable but doesn't advertising Trump correctness a correctly or precisely named thing that nobody uses is objectively less useful than a slightly wrongly named thing that lots of people benefit from? Isomorphic JavaScript, anyone? Yes, so I think the isomorphic JavaScript example is an interesting one because they have used a word which has a very precise meaning and then used it very poorly. They're really just saying, oh, you can run JavaScript on the server or the browser. It has no real relation to isomorphism. Certainly because it's the JavaScript world they've publicised that out and everyone knows what they mean. So in that sense it is a good enough name but it's certainly not something that I would sort of recommend people use for that. The point here is there is no such thing as an objectively good name. It's all subjective. I'm not going to say that these names I have the answer because I'm talking about names. I'm simply saying that there is no correct way to do it. It's just whatever we choose to use. However, again, council, people to use the existing names if they can. Jed, thank you so much for your talk on names and their importance and how we might go about naming things for the maximum benefit and not having too many fights over it.