What is a Discord Server

Let's start with the basics and explain what to expect in a Discord server. There are two types of channels and most of the people in the Discord server have roles that grant them access to different parts of the server.

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04 May 2020
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Overview

Imagine a forum and instant messenger program merged together. A Discord server is a place where your students are brought together and they have different topic channels to discuss diverse stuff and keeping context relatively focused.

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Text channels

Text channels are denoted with a hashtag symbol "#" and allow people to type public messages on the channel. One can mention other people using "@" tag. There are many text channels for different topics - like hobbies, homework, subjects and so on.

Voice Channels

Voice channels allow people to talk to each other. The power of "Discord" is that one can adjust the individual volume levels of other participants in the conversation. While being into a voice channel, one may choose to share his screen and demonstrate work. That feature works only on the desktop version, not on the web, not on mobile. Additionally, one may turn on a video camera and show his work live.

Roles and permissions

In a server different people should only have access to particular channels. In order to guide your people to different parts of the server, you must give them diverse roles (for example: teacher, subject-a, student-general). Therefore, you could manage their roles and their permissions, so that only teachers should have access to the "Teacher's channel", subject-a to access the "Subject-a channel", student-general to all channels, related to students in general.

How to join a server

Let's give the word to discord themselves: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034842871-How-do-I-join-a-Server-

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Create a community hub with Discord

Creating online space for your students

The next step in the Survival Guide is to create an online place where your students can come together. A place where you can keep them engaged with various activities and where they could share their thoughts, concerns and experience. This place will be the "base" of your comminity. You could manage this base and easily navigate the people in it (both teachers and students).

There are plenty of tools that allow video meetings alone. We need something more. We need a platform that allows students to have discussions both live and asynchronously - that means that one must be able to post a comment or a question and in a few hours another person can see it and respond.

The community hubs that we researched and know of are:

"Google Classroom";
"Microsoft Teams";
"Slack";
"Discord";

Each one of these has its own niche and if you have experience with them, go ahead and use them. If you don't, follow the steps in this lesson and try "Discord".

Why Discord?
Our way of thinking is that your users are children and some of them may already use the popular tool "Discord" for gaming communities.

From the administrator's perspective "Discord" is free, feature-rich and modifiable to great extends. There are plenty of Bots that allow automation of tasks. The application works in a web browser, on desktop and on mobile.

Note that we are not related to "Discord" by any means, referrals or affiliates. We just believe it's a great free tool that you could use to create a place where your community could gather and communicate.