Editing Your Google+ Profile

Our school has been slowly rolling out Google+. We started in the high school where both staff and students are able to have access to it. The principal now uses their HS community for his daily announcements. They are using Google+ for their groups and clubs. Last spring we also began using it with select cross-school committees.

One reason for our slow roll out was the challenges Google+ was creating for YouTube channels and working with photos in Picasa web. Now that those are mostly resolved, we wanted to roll it out to the rest of the faculty and staff.

Our first challenge was finding a compelling use for Google+ and to clarify when to use Google+, when to use email and when to meet face-to-face. We created an ES Faculty community and we allowed everyone to join the community being used by our research and development team.

We did a soft roll out in December. We flipped the switch and let staff know it was there and that there would be training at a later date. That way, eager adopters could get started and the rest know why the new link appeared in their Google Apps.

Next year our primary and intermediate schools will merge into one larger school. The ed tech departments have already merged, moving into a shared space in the elementary library. For the Google+ training, we worked with intermediate staff in one session and the primary staff a few weeks later. It was efficient to have all of us in there supporting the faculty.

Prior to the workshops we sent out directions to enable everyone to set up their Google+ profile and tweak the notifications.

In the workshop there was confusion around Google+ circles since that is the main organizational tool in Google+ but we are primarily using Communities. Some people were relieved to realize they didn’t have to follow everyone back or add them to circles.

Within the week, we were having questions regarding editing their profiles. Specifically they wanted to know where to change their avatar and turn of the photos and videos tabs. I created the following short tutorial to assist them.