This tutorial is an introduction to Google Plus Communities.
In order to access Google Plus Communities you need to be a Google Plus user.
So you are going to first need to activate your Google Plus account.
You can do that from you inbox, your gmail inbox, or you can go to
plus.google.com to get started with Google Plus.
Google Plus Communities are shared spaces on line
where folks can come together to share ideas, to share resources,
and to collaborate with each other.
Here are just a few of the ways people are using Google Communities.
I use Google Communities for a couple of the courses that I teach.
Its gives us a shared space online where we can post comments and ideas,
share resources, ask questions.
If you are using it with students, they need to be over, 13 or older.
You can also use it with other professionals that you work with.
With your colleagues or connecting with parents,
or folks who have similar interests.
So these are just a few of the communities that I am a member of.
Some of these communities I moderate
which means that I sort of set the structure for that community
and some of these I created and some of these I joined
that others created that were interesting to me.
And you can see that communities range greatly in the amount of members
that they have.
You may be looking for a community that has a lot of members
and a lot of activity happening or you may be looking for
a smaller close nit community with just a smaller group of people
sharing resources for a specific purpose.
Communities can be private or public.
As you can see here there is a community for a course that I teach
that is a private community.
Only folks who I invite can be part of that community.
These other communities are public and open to anyone.
Here is just a small sampling of communities that are available
in Google Plus. There are lots and lots of communities already out there.
You can see alot of these have quite a few members.
So you can browse and find communities that are already existing
where people are already active and having conversations with each other,
sharing great ideas and resources, and you can join those existing communities.
Or you can create your own if there is a specific purpose that you want
to collaborate with other folks about.
Here are some things that Google Communities can do for you.
You can get answers to your questions and get feedback on your ideas.
This is one of my favorite things about Google Communities.
If I'm pondering a new idea, or just doing some brainstorming,
or would like some advice,
Google Communities is typically the place I go for that.
So I can just post a question. I can put it into a specific community
which is what I've done here.
I created a community for teacher educators.
I can post a question in there and you can see that I got 7 comments
that were on this one question.
People giving me advice and resources and suggestions.
So the purpose of a community, of posting ideas in a community,
is that people are there in this community space on purpose.
So membership in a community is mutual.
People choose to join for a specific reason.
They want to engage in conversations with other people.
They have an interest in whatever the community is focused on
and they are there on purpose.
Now, not every member of a community is an active member
and you know is regularly participating but lots of people are there on purpose
and they are there because they want to participate.
So the odds are pretty good that if you are a member of an active
community and you post an idea or question
you are going to get some feedback from the community.
Which I just think is really valuable.
You can also find some great resources, connect with people who are like-minded,
and if you are a twitter user Google Plus can have some real advantages to you
in that you can have lengthier conversations than you can through twitter
so I'm actually going to go into Google Communities now
and show you how to navigate. Show you how to find communities
and how to join them and how to create your own.
So here is my Google Plus page. If I hover over the home button
here in the top left corner, I can find my option for communities.
Now these are communities that I moderate
so these are either communities I created,
or communities that I am a member of but also a moderator for.
These are communities that other folks created but I joined
because they are about something that I am interested in.
Now if I scroll down here to the section on discover communties
I'll find other communities that Google is recommending for me
based on my profile that I've set up previously,
based on things that I post about, and based on my existing communities,
these are some recommendations for me.
So I may want to just pop into some of these and see what is happening there.
You want to pay attention to how many members
and how many posts are in there.
So there are some communities that have a lot of members
but only a tiny bit of posts, so there's a lot of people in here
but not a lot of activity happening.
I would maybe prefer to be in one that has a lot of members
but also has a lot of activity happening.
And you can go into a community and take a look at the kinds of posts
that are being shared there and see if its something
that is interesting to you.
If it is, you can just click on the community, go into the community
and then you can click this button to join the community.
Now some communities you can join without having to ask,
but in some communities, the moderators have turned on a feature
that makes them, gives them permission to mod..., to control who joins.
So you may see that button say "ask to join" or it may just say "join."
Here is a way you can find some communities
if you are looking for communities for something specific.
You can do a search here in the Google Plus search bar.
So here at the top of my Google Plus profile I can search
for something here.
Let's say you are interested in using Chrome Books.
So I'm going to do a search for Chrome Book
and its going to search through everything on Google Plus
but if I'm just looking for a community,
I'm going to click here on communities and its going to find for me
all the communities that have anything to do with Chrome Book.
And you can see there are quite a few. So I may want to go into some of these
and see which ones of these are active. This one looks like its pretty active.
So I'm going to take a look at that community and see what kinds
of resources and posts are being shared
and if there is something great happening in that community
that you want to be a part of you can just join the community.
So this one you don't have to get permission to join.
You can just join.
Then another thing you can do after you join a community
is you can turn notifications on if you would like to be notified
whenever someone makes a new post.
Now this is a great thing in most cases because you don't have to remember
to keep checking the community to see if there has been new activity.
Right here it tells me that I have notifications "off" but if I turn
notifications on just by clicking here, I can toggle this on and off
and now I'll get a little notification up here in my little notification space.
I'll get a notification when something new has been posted here.
So that way I wouldn't have to come back and check on this every so often.
I'm going to keep notifications off because this is a pretty active community
and I would be getting quite a few notification.
You can see there have been several posts just this afternoon.
I don't want all those notifications
but you may have communities you do want notifications on,
for example, this community for a course I'm teaching this semester,
I have notification on because I want to know when one of my students
posts a question or shares a resource or posts an assignment
or something like that.
That's all about finding communities,
and joining communities, and using communities.
If you wanted to create your own community,
this is where you would go to do that.
So you click "create community" and you can choose
whether it is a private community or a public community.
Now a public community will allow anyone in the world to join.
A private community means that you can only invite specific folks.
So lets say we're going to do a public community
and here is where you can choose where you can control people who join.
So you can either say, no, anybody can join
or yes, people can ask you to join, but then you have to approve their joining.
So I'm just making a fake community called, "demo."
Its going to show you if there's anything similar already
because you may be starting to create a community and realize
oh, there is already a community like that.
Then you would just create your own and that community would be
an actual community. Then you can share that link with other people
and invite specific people to your community.
So I encourage you now to go browse some existing communities
find one to join or find several and create your own and invite
people to that community.
So go ahead and get Googling.