Creating a Google Community for Staff Collaboration

Creating and nourishing positive school communities is important. I am always looking for new ways to get people together and talking. Google+ Communities is one way to connect staff and offer a closed space for collaboration. In a closed community, posts are only shared with members of the community and can not be seen by non group members. 

Many of our principals have started blogs as a way to share information with staff. While a blog is a great way to send out information, it isn't always the best platform for collaboration. If your goal is to get everyone in your school contributing, sharing, and engaging with each other; check out the following steps for setting up your own Google+ Community! 

In order to set up a Google+ Community, you will need to have created your Google+ profile. More information about creating your Google+ profile can be found at this blog post. Once your profile is active, you will see +Your Name appear on the far right of any Google App, selecting it will take you to your Google+ page.

Once at your Google+ profile, find the pull down menu on the far left. Pull down to Communities.

Select Create community, highlighted in blue, on the left side of the screen.

The following box will pop up. You have two options for creating a community. Selecting the option on the left means that only people with @fsusd.org emails will be able to join the group. They will not be able to search, or see it in search even if you select the option on the second page of the pop-up.

I recommend using the options on the right. Leave the group as not restricted and then select Private. This will keep your group and its contents protected from people who are not members of your group, but still allow people to find your community.

Select a name for your group that will be easily searchable. I highly recommend adding FSUSD to the end of your title so all someone has to do is type FSUSD into a search to find all the groups available within the district. Make sure you choose the option to have your group eligible for searching. When you're done select Create Community.

                                         

You will be redirected to the page management to edit your Community.  The pop up window will prompt you to make sure your Community name is correct, add a tagline, change the photo, and set up categories for discussion.  Categories will allow you to group like posts/topics together. You will also notice a space at the bottom to add information about your group. These features can all be edited by the Community Manager (you) at any time by clicking on the gear to Edit Community. When completed, select Done and you are now ready to invite people to your Google+ Community!

Find and select the invite button at the top right to open the pop-up window. You will have a space to write your own message to the people you are inviting. At the bottom, you can include the list of people you wish to invite to your community. If you have set all your group members up in their own Circle on Google+ then you can select the Circle, otherwise, enter their names individually.  If they do not have an active Google+ account you will not be able to invite them.  Once they have created their Google+ account, they can search Communities for yours and request to join.

You are now ready to post to your group! You have several options; creating a standard post, including pictures or video, adding links to articles, cool resources or, interesting web content, or scheduling events. Events created in this way will add the event to each individual calendar. There is not really a need to do a separate calendar invite.

Communities and group spaces are only as good as the people using them. If no one posts or contributes to the group, then it will just sit dormant. Consider turning on the notification.

This feature will cause the little bell at the top of all Google Apps (email, Drive, etc) to gain red badge to indicate someone has posted in a your community. Clicking on this bell will give you a small menu indicating which communities have new posts. You can go directly to the community by selecting it from this menu. If you are not ready to view the posts, you can select the bell again and the menu will close.

 The Communities page will always show the communities you moderate and the communities you've joined. You can join a community by using the search box to type in the name of a community or keywords for a topic of interest. Once you are a member, join in the conversation, share your ideas, and have fun expanding your PLN.