I have been asked by many to share my Thinkfinity Community Tips and Tricks, selected from my online course Thinkfinity & Social Networking for Educators, with you in this public venue, the Help Center. I hope these suggestions will be of value to you, but feel free to reply to my posts with comments or questions.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 0: Do NOT use your email address as your community username.
Your username is how you are known in the community. While you may choose in your Profile to keep your email address private, your username is always public. By using your email address as your username, you are making it public and you may have an increase in spam (unsolicited email).
If you have accidentally entered your email address as your username, please use the Contact Us link at the bottom of every Thinkfinity Community page and let Thinkfinity Staff know what you would like it changed to.
Note: Usernames must start with a letter. Allowed characters are A-Z, 0-9, _, @, - (dash), and .(dot). You can NOT use spaces.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 1: Join a Group that interests you.
Select Browse All > Groups in the gold navigation bar and browse for groups with similar interest to your own.
Found a group you would like to join, look under the Actions menu on the right of the group Overview page and click on Join this group. This may place your profile in the Recently Joined listing so everyone can get to know you.
Once joined the Join this group link changes to Leave this group. Now you know you can join and leave a group at will.
More: Look under Notifications for the Receive email notifications link. Selecting to receive email notifications will send you an email every time someone posts in this group. Once Receive email notifications is selected the link changes to Stop email notifications. Now you know you can start and stop email notifications at will in any group or community you may wish to follow closely for any given time.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 2: Take a Peek
You can quickly learn about someone in Thinkfinity Community by hovering your cursor over their name or avatar. In one glance you will see their title, department, contact information, status level, and most recent activity.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 3: Join your State Group
Are you looking for educators in your state to meet up with, go to the Thinkfinity Community homepage and scroll down, looking on the right side of the page, for State Groups. Anyone can view the content but you must be a member of Thinkfinity Community to participate.
The State Groups are all Open groups so membership is optional; however, I think it would be good to join the group so others might find you there.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 4: I love Spell Check
As you venture out into the general community, you will want your discussion posts to look professional. Please remember to Spell Check your response right before you select Add Reply. You may be so glad you did.
Look for your Spell Check icon (the green checkmark next to abc) in the right corner of your Reply to textbox.
Note to some: You can even toggle your Spell check to eight languages from the drop down arrow beside the Spell Check icon.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 5: Remember Who, not Where
Have you ever forgotten the location of a file, but remembered who worked on it? In Thinkfinity Community you can easily get to all of the content that someone has worked on. Just navigate to their profile and go to their Stuff tab. Inside that tab you can select the type of content, like documents, discussions, or blog post.
Note: The general membership can NOT see your documents or saved favorite if you have marked it Private.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 6: Your Reputation in Thinkfinity Community
All new members start with a status of New User. You can increase your reputation in Thinkfinity Community by contributing in several different ways. One of the best ways to increase your reputation is by answering questions. When the member who asked the question marks your answer as helpful or correct you get a boost in your reputation. Other ways to contribute are creating documents, publishing blog posts, and posting to a discussion. You total number of points will increase by the following:
For more information, please read How To: Earn Points in the Verizon Thinkfinity Community, one of our many helpful documents in the Thinkfinity Community Help Center.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 7: What else can you tell me about bookmarking favorites?
A Favorite Resource is a bookmark or link to any website, document, or discussion that is useful to you. Your Favorite Resources live within the Verizon Thinkfinity community.
I hope you have read the document, How To: Add a Favorite Resource and know the three ways to add a Favorite Resource to your My Stuff. In this document, you also learned that when bookmarking a personal website, you can mark it as Private. A personal site might be a recipe, travel information or favorite sports page that you want to keep but which is not an educational site for sharing within the Thinkfinity Community.
Tip 3a: When you bookmark a resource please note you have the option to check a box to "Make this favorite resource private. (only you will see it)" That would be my preference if you bookmark a lesson from this course.
Tip 3b: Why is there a ribbon after each bookmark when I am looking at the Browse All > Favorite Resources list (accessed from the gold navigation bar)?
Clicking on a gray ribbon will allow you to save a resource to your favorites right from the Browse All > Favorite Resources list. I think it is fascinating to also note the "# of saves" after a favorite. This can quickly tell you which resources others have found of value. If a ribbon turns red, it tells you that you have already saved the favorite to your favorites.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 8: How can I edit my Profile/Privacy Settings?
Your Verizon Thinkfinity Community Profile is all about you. Your profile can contain a short bio, pictures, and your recent activity. Through Privacy Settings you can decide how much information you share with the community.
Tip 2a: You set up your profile during the registration process, but you can always modify your information. Please read All About: Profiles and using the gold navigation bar to locate your profile (select My Stuff > Profile) and make appropriate edits.
Tip 2b: Once you have your Profile set up the way you want, you want to read Privacy Settings and establish your appropriate Privacy Settings.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 9: Enhance your Profile
Your profile is your identity in Thinfinity Community. Your colleagues will go to it to learn about you, understand your expertise, and read content you have written. Make sure it is up to date. At a minimum you should make sure to:
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 10: Let people know what you are doing
Have you moused over a person's avatar and, while reviewing a summary of their profile, seen their latest update, a chunk of information telling what they are doing? You may even click on the avatar and see that person's profile page to locate their personal update history.
Staying connected is as simple as posting short, quick messages (updates) using the Community Activity widget on your home page that you see when you enter the community(or, select Communities > My Community View from the gold navigation bar.) Perhaps you let everyone know you are "Training today" or "Attending a retreat." You can post a chunk of information as frequently as you want.
To delete an update:
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 11: How can I personalize My Community View?
When you log into the community you enter a page called My Community View which may be customized to your needs.
If you are not on this page at this time, you may select Communities > My Community View from the gold navigation bar to go there. Please take a look and let me know if you need any help arranging your page to your liking. Simply select widgets that allow you to quickly and easily follow developments within Recent Discussion, Popular Favorite Resources, your Friends, and more.When you select a widget, it isn't a fast move to drag it into position, but a little patience and you can have all of the widgets you find useful.
Check out How To: Personalize Your Community View and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation - Community Personalization (PPT) to personalize your page.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 12: Get Notified
You can have Thinkfinity send you an email when content you care about is added or changed. This is an alternative to feeds, which require a feed aggregator.
To begin receiving email notifications, navigate to the content you care about - a discussion or blog, for example - and select Receive email notifications under the Actions menu. To stop receiving email notifications, select Stop Email Notifications.
Note: You can manage all of your email notifications by going to the Email Notifications tab in your profile.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 13: Reply Using Email
If you subscribe to receive email notifications on any community content (check the Actions menu), you can NOT post a reply in the discussion simply by replying in your email client to the notification email.
For example, imagine you are subscribed to notifications on a discussion thread. When someone posts a reply to the discussion, you will receive an email about it. Replying to the email, typing your discussion reply just as you would type a reply to any email and sending it, will NOT work in Thinkfinity Community. Replying this way to the email notification that you would like to respond to goes to a noreplies@thinkfinity.org and it does NOT appear in Thinkfinity Community.
You will need to click on the View the Full Discussion link and log in to the community in order to respond to the discussion notification you received.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 14: Help! How can I stop receiving so email notifications?
A course participant writes, asking if there is a way to stop the influx of email messages that she is receiving. She changed all default responses to NO from the preferences tab - but she simply cannot manage several dozen email messages a day coming into her work inbox. Do you have this problem?
Though I responded to her by private mesage, I think I'd like to explore this topic a little more with all of you, hence this post.
I certainly do understand how email notifications can become a problem. First, I'll point out a document we have in the Help Center called How To: Manage Email Notifications, compiled by our wonderful Community Hosts. This document warrants a careful read if you are wanting some serious control your email notifications.
The course participant went to the email notifications in her Preferences as described in the initial section of the document and set them all to "No." However, the settings there will only apply to content that the member creates or comments on from the time they change the setting forward. Any content previously set to receive notifications will remain unchanged and she will continue to receive notifications on that content.
What to do?
Please read the section in the document on Removing Notifications for Specific Content, using your My Stuff > Overview. I think this should help!
After you have these under control, another thought is to chose in your Preferences to receive an email summary from the community. This step is described under the section in this document on General Email Preferences.
Email notifications is a wonderful feature, but it can get out of hand. I want you to be able to manage your own account and its email notifications to your satisfaction.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 15: Watch a User from your My Community View
To Watch a User, you want to select Communities > My Community View from the gold navigation bar.
Want watch another user, you will need to add another widget.
Jane Brown
Community Manager
Tips and tricks 16: Watch a Tag widget (now here is a real time saver)
For those of you wondering what a "Watch a Tag" widget is, you may select Communities > My Community View on the gold navigation bar and then click on the edit link next to the words My Community View (located at the top of this page.)
Next, click on Content in the left column of the available Widgets. Scroll down and select Watch a Tag. The widget shows in the right column. Click and drag (using the green +Drag to Add button) and place the widget where you want it on your page.
Now you want to click on the grey drop-down arrow and type in a Tag (some word) that you want JIVE to watch for and show you any entries made that are tagged with your keyword. You can select the number of results to show and the type of resources you want reviewed and to show.
Save Properties and you will have saved yourself a lot of time by allowing JIVE to work for you.
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