Skip to main content

How to share and collaborate with a class and google+ circles


Google+ circles are a great way to share with students, you generally have ownership over what goes on in the circles you create - and can share only the information you like with the people/students you need to.  It is easy to maintain professional distance from students and still utilise the great sharing options of a social network.

This is how you set up a class as a circle.....


1) Log in to your gmail account, in the top left you will see a '+you' or +'yourname' if you have signed up already.  Click this and it will take you to your google+ page - if you haven't used it before
you will have to answer a couple of questions and it will ask you to add 'people you know' from your address book - you can skip those steps as they are not essential at the moment.

2) The left hand column should look like this one on the left, go down to 'find people' - it will take you to a new screen, navigate to the bar near the top that says
'Your Circles'.  Click this, it will probably be empty!

3) Now we need to start a new circle, hover over the 'drop here to create a circle' circle, and it will allow you to click a button to 'create circle'.  A new box will come up asking you to name it, if it is a class - give it the class name!!

4) As with address book, you can start typing the names of class members and then it will autocomplete, click done when you are finished and you are away!!!!


5) Experiment with posts and sharing, as it is the only way to get used to it - have a go at sharing with feedly.......

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Learning analytics in secondary schools

What can be learnt from the challenges faced in the use of learning analytics in tertiary institutions, when considering its application in secondary education? photo by Frank Dabek I posed this question after reading several sources regarding the use of learning analytics in education.  As a secondary school teacher I was interested in finding out if there was anything to be learnt about the application of analytics in tertiary setting , before it is embedded into secondary schooling.  The NMC 2013 Horizon Report claims that within 2-3 years it will have developed beyond the 20% penetration point.  After summarising sources I found common themes in the challenges faced when utilising learning analytics. Driving forces behind analytics Error correction and data override Collection of valuable data Ethics, morals and privacy I will evaluate the considerations of each challenge when applied in the secondary context to raise the achievement of learners and inform successfu

Motivation and homework follow up...

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '.  The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score.  I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!

Gamification of human anatomy

Poke-a-muscle and whack-a-bone are two really fun web apps that refresh understanding of human anatomy.  I'm using them today in my lesson and getting the boys to screen grab their best score and post it to our Google+ community to encourage some healthy competition between the students.  I finished the lesson off with a collaborative problem solving activity that I found on the TES website which asks the students to match up statements about functions of the skeleton !