Given the importance of Google Plus and its promising potential as an educational social networking website for educators and teachers, I am adding here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning another article for teachers to discover more about its hidden secrets.
Just to put you in the picture, we have started a series of posts on the the topic Educational Social Networking. We have already published three parts namely :
- Educational Social Networking Part 1
- Educational Social Networking Part 2
- Educational Social Networking Part 3
We are actually working on more parts to add to this series. We will also be posting a FREE ebook that will contain all these series and many more. For today, we will be talking about some interesting tips for teachers on how to use Goople Plus as featured by Online Colleges.
Whether you have been using Google+ for long time or you have just started , the following tips will help you better maximise the potential of this social network both in your classroom and for your professional development.
Each of the tips below are based on articles from a variety of online sources namely Mashable, Chronicle, Appsusergroups, Hackededucation, Geekestry, Theatrprof, and many more. Click on any title to read the full learn more about the tip.
1- Use Hangouts for Teaching
Hangouts is a great service offered for free by Google+. Teachers can use it to deliver virtual lessons to their students and give remedial work to those in need of it.
2- Use Sparks for research
Both of you and your students can use Sparks to keep track of the topics you are interested in. Click on the title to learn more.
3- Use Circles for collaboration
Circles are a great means for students to collaborate with each other on classroom projects, and share resources and materials. Click on the title to learn more.
4- Keep parents updated
By adding parents to cirlces teachers will enable them to keep track of their kids schooling.
5- Crossposting updates
In case you are using multiple social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter then you can use this option to cross post updates at once.
6- Share Google Reader Posts
You can easily share your Google Reader with your students and let them explore some of the content you are subscribed to.
7- Add media with a single click
Teachers can easily add any piece of media with just drag and drop.
8- Video Chat
This is particularly useful when delivering a virtual lesson, student can see you and you can also see them giving it a classroom like feel.
9- Disable resharing
If you have content that you share only with your class and you do not want it to be reshared on other places then you can use this option to disable resharing and be able to control who can see what you share.
10- Pay heed to who you are updating
You might have other people other than your students on your Google+ which means that not the same message can be shared with all. Use this option to select who can see your message.
11- Use Instant Upload
With this new option teachers and students can instantly upload content to Google+ be it videos, photos, docs and many more. This option can be used even from mobile phone.
12- Integrate Googlpe Plus with other services cuh as Google Docs and Google Calendar
13- Google Plus as a learning management system
Read this article of how teachers can use Google+ as a learning management system.
14- Be careful with content you post
Read how to deal with restrictions on the content you post on Google Plus.
15- Export Data from Facebook
Learn how to migrate your data from Facbook to Google Plus in case you have alot of interesting content on your Facebook.
16- Stay in touch with former students
Read this article to learn how to use Google plus to stay in touch with former students.
17- Google Plus archive
Learn how to archive eveything you share on Google Plus
18- Create different cirlces for different purposes
Google plus lets you create different circles for different purposes. Teachers can create circles according to the classes they have or based on the topics they want to cover in that school year.
19- Search Within your University
Check out this article from Impact of Social Sciences to learn more about the potential of Google Plus in Universities.
20- Teach Students about Privacy
This is a great article to read more on this topic. check it out