Thomas J. West Music

The Music Professional Learning Network is just over a week old, and the response has been nothing short of explosive. Over 300 users have registered, over 700 status updates have been generated, and over 100 forum topics have been created!

One of the common questions that new members have had as they grow accustomed to the site is "What's the best way to keep up with all of the great information?" I created the following screencast in order to help new users and everyone keep track of what is turning into an amazing resource for all teachers of music everywhere.

Major points for managing the stream:

1. After registering, go to My Account > Settings > Notifications and customize your email notifications. Depending upon how often you plan to visit MPLN, you may want more or less email.
2. Go to your own email client, create an MPLN folder, and create an email filter to direct all incoming emails from noreply@musicpln.org to that folder.
3. Unless you changed it in the notifications settings, any content you add to the site, whether a status update or a forum topic, will automatically notify you via email any time someone responds to your content.
4. Almost every list of information on the site has a filter. The main activity stream can be filtered to show only updates, only new members, only forum posts, etc. The forums can be filtered by most last active, most posts, etc.
5. In the activity stream, you can follow people's status updates by clicking on the favorite button. This is different than the like button and far more useful than the Twitter favorite feature because when you favorite an update, you are actually follow the replies as well as the original message.
6. Use the Forums tab to see the most recent activity on all Forums and Groups at once. This too is filterable.
7. Use the Quick Site Links at the top of the right side bar to get to information quickly. These links are also shown in a pop-up menu on the integrated wibiya bar on the bottom of the screen.

Here's a list of tips that were not featured in the walkthrough video!

1. Use the Groups tab to view content in a single group that you have interest in. This again is filterable.
2. Use My Account > Groups to see all of the newsgroups you've joined listed in one place. And guess what? It's filterable!
3. Use My Account > Friends to quickly find people you've friended. I keep this list set to Alphabetical by first name.
4. POWER TIP: You can search for anything using the search field found at the top of every screen. Why hunt through menus for things?
5. Don't forget to use the information displayed in the right sidebar. Lots of short cuts there.
6. There is a fantastically useful Return to the Top of the Screen button on the wibiya bar at the bottom of the screen. It's on the right and looks like an up arrow.

MPLN is a fantastic resource that is only going to improve with time. As Dr. Pisano said in his recent blog post, this is only MPLN version 1.0 - there are a whole list of improvements he shared for version 1.1 and he already has plans for v. 2.0!

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.