Until recently, our main communication methods were individual meetings, written memos, and group meetings. You-and-me meetings were time-consuming, written memos were costly and often lost, and group meetings were not usually well-attended.  The constant demand of keeping everyone informed and up-to-date still is a daunting task. Today we have a wealth of innovative tools that, although not a replacement for traditional communication means, are effective and efficient in many cases.

Michigan LearnPort offers a collection of online communication tools called Community Rooms that can be used to streamline some communication tasks and create professional learning communities. See here for more information on professional learning communities.

Community Rooms make engaging a group quick and easy.  Content can be shared for use at any time.  Different functions in the Community Rooms allow for real-time chats or asynchronous discussion.  Discussions can extend response time to all staff—24 hours a day, seven days a week—when group input and planning is needed from many people at your school or program. The constant availability of discussion is especially important in education, when staff are working both day and night shifts to serve the community.

Community Rooms are virtual collaboration spaces that allow users to post, review and retrieve documents, schedule meetings, email colleagues and have online discussions or chats.  Community Rooms are ‘public’ (everyone can see them) or ‘private’ (users must be invited to join them). 

To find a Community Room, in the left-hand navigation look for Collaboration Center.  Click on it to select it.  Select Community Rooms. 

In the Keyword search box use a unique term in the title of your Community Room to find it.  In the search results window, click on the name of the Community Room to launch it.

MACAE currently has seven Community Rooms set up for its members. By entering MACAE into the keyword search box, you will find rooms set up for each focus group, as well as one for the professional development, governmental affairs and membership services committees. Here you can find links to the appropriate pages on MACAE’s homepage, as well as information you may have missed in a previous meeting.

For example, if you are a member of the Alternative Education Focus Group and needed to see the MDE Grad Rate Amendment, you could search MACAE, open the Alternative Education Focus Group room, and find the amendment stored in Content.

To prevent the need to search for a Community Room, users are encouraged to subscribe to it by checking the two notification boxes.

By checking these boxes and clicking on the Update button, the Community Room will show up in your “My Personal Pages” view, and you'll get notified when new content or discussions are added to the room.

These collaboration tools provide equal access and broad reach across your group.  Record-keeping is done without added staff time because discussions and chats can be copied and pasted into Microsoft Word.  The calendar makes planning easier.

All Michigan LearnPort users can also create their own Community Rooms, simply by clicking on Community Room Management and the Create New Community Room link.  To learn more about this useful free tool, review the tutorial “Collaboration Center Tutorial” in the My Account area of Michigan LearnPort.  Use the keyword search term “community” to find it.

If you have any tips on how MACAE could more effectively use the Community Room feature, let us know at editor@macae.org.