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

How to collaborate with ChatGPT in the research process and actually learn something

If you have used chatGPT before, it can sometimes feel like talking with someone who has done too much of their 'research on Facebook', filling in gaps with random facts marginally related to the topic just so they can respond and keep the conversation going. However, if applied or 'prompted' correctly, with the user utterly aware of the limitations and ethical considerations, chatGPT can be a helpful research assistant. There is already a wide range of tools available that are built on chatGPT that can support many of the things described below; however, I am still a bit hesitant to rush in with most of them being 'freemium' or asking you to upload your own research and other details or data into their database, I'm happy to stick with the open version of chatGPT as it is what our students have access to. Image created with AI The following guide highlights some prompts, some follow-up questions and most importantly, what you need to do next to follow up a

Group email parents with Kamar and Gmail

After # EdChatNZ on Thursday night I was really determined to make digital contact with parents and share with them the great work their sons were doing!  At our school we use Kamar to collect absences, store student data and report back to parents.  It has a handy function where you can click on a student and email the parents directly, but I wanted to email all the parents of classes at once.  After a bit of playing around I managed to find a way to do it, here's what I did!!! 1) In Kamar select 'Printing' then select 'Export'  This will save the file so you can copy the addresses into gmail, rather than printing it out. 2) Now you need to select your class - as I wanted to email one class at a time I need to select a single class, but you have to option to select multiple groups.  Click on 'Option Subject' and then type your teacher code into the box.  Your classes should all appear and then when you select the class it will copy into the bo

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!!!