How to Use Google+ Easily

Google+ (pronounced Google plus) is a Google social networking project. The Google+ design team sought to replicate the way people interact offline more closely than is the case in other social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter. The project’s slogan is “Real-life sharing rethought for the web.”

Google+ is the latest social media platform which has caught the imagination of professionals in all walks of life. Fortunately for educators, many features such as Circles, Sparks, and Hangouts are of immense value – especially for an educator teaching at institutions located in different places, who not only loses of time in traveling from one location to other, but feels the extra strain involved in alternately travelling and teaching.

Google+'s Hangouts is a tool that takes the travel-strain out of the teaching process. Teachers can use that time to conduct more virtual classrooms at a greater number of places. This enables institutions to teach more students with fewer teachers, thereby saving costs and placing institutions in a position to reward teachers in better ways. The biggest advantage is that the Google Hangouts allows a teacher to teach to ten classrooms at a time. Where there are more, each of the receiving classrooms can relay it, in turn, to ten more classrooms.

Classes can be interactive and students at any center can ask questions through FM mikes. The speaker's image will always be enlarged so that there is no confusion as to who is speaking. You don't have to search faces to find out who is speaking. Here are some suggestions for using Google+ Hangouts to improve your teaching experience.

Google+ features:

Circles are like categories for your connections, so that you can share updates selectively with different groups. Examples of such groups might include family, friends, office colleagues and people that you share a particular interest with. Circles may be discrete or have overlap, so that, for example, someone you work with who’s also in your book club will get updates for both groups. Users outside a circle can see a list of member names but not the name of the circle.

Google+ is integrated with other Google applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Calendar.

Google+ follows two less ambitious attempts by the company, Google Wave and Google Buzz. The service launched in beta on June 28, 2011, on an invitation-only basis. The first members were permitted to invite friends the next day but that permission was rescinded almost immediately because of what Google described as “insane demand” for new accounts. Once the service is out of beta, Google plans to increase the Google+ membership gradually.