Community Groups

[Tina Gorski-Strong]

We have signed on to use Community Groups.  For any of you who already use them- can you shre some best practices.  What Categories you have set up and how many pages have you offered to your constituents?

Thanks

Tina Gorski-Strong

Senior Advancement Officer

The Wheeler School

[Paul Way]

Hey Tina, 

 

From the start we used community groups pretty heavily.  It seemed to me at the time that this was a good way of splitting up our K-12 parents and students into distinct groups by division (ie: ES Parents, MS Parents, US Parents).  It does allow us to put pictures and links on the portal that don't appear for non group members.  Since there is so much information for our users to wade through, it provided one avenue for providing customized views.  

 

After working with this paradigm for a few years, I am not sure it is the best way to go.  We have consistently had problems with people not being in the right groups, people not seeing the same information, and having a hard time directing people where to navigate.  

 

We also use community groups for our Environmental Outdoor Education program.  Students electively sign up for trips using the community groups, which has had a bit more success.  

 

Really one of the problems is that community groups is competing with Facebook groups.  This is an uphill battle for everyone involved.  

 

Let me know if you have any specific questions and I might be able to help you out.  

[Tina Gorski-Strong]

Paul-

That's a little discouraging.  We are moving from multiple portals to community groups in hopes that we can streamline information.  Can I take a look at your website- even just the public view?

Thanks

Tina

[Laura Flynn]

We have created a couple of parent groups (Dads Club and Parents Guild), as well as a few student groups for organized clubs/activities (Robotics, school play, clubs by request). I have used community group pages for summer classes, although I don't have attendance/drop box and assignment features. Also, I've used experimented with group pages as technology training hubs, with a group for a specific tool like Comic Life or Voki. I can post how-to's, hints, project examples, tutorial videos, etc. Although it keeps my work super organized for mini-trainings, I don't feel like the students/teachers use them. They have evolved to be mostly for my sake for training.

[Rebecca Thomas]

We have a community group for each division. That group contains information for parents about what's going on in the division as well as photos, downloads, etc.

We also allow any student/parent/alumni groups that would like to communicate with each other to have a community group. They have to maintain it though. That's what I actually like about the community groups. It makes it easy for them to have a place behind the password where they can post there stuff without intervention from me.