MyPeers Can Support Virtual Work During COVID-19

MyPeers Can Support Virtual Work During COVID-19

 Laura Hunt Trull: All right, everyone. Good afternoon or good morning depending on where you are in the nation. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Laura Hunt Trull, and I am the mayor of MyPeers. So, my job in this community is to move MyPeers forward, and this has been quite the week for that.

To those of us—to those of you who have joined us today because you were having technical difficulty on our first MyPeers for remote work webinar yesterday. Welcome. Thank you for your patience.

We have 1,176 people attempt to join that webinar yesterday. It completely overloaded the system and we did have some audio issues with that. So, thank you for your patience and for coming back on and joining us.

We're gonna get started. We do have about 150 members today, so that's going to be a much more manageable size and hopefully there will not be any issues with the audio. We are also recording this session, so, hello to folks who will be reviewing the recording as we post it to MyPeers later on today. We're going to get started with a little bit of housekeeping. All participants are in listen-only mode, so that means that you're unable to be unmuted, so that we can minimize the background noise and distraction.

If you do have a question, I invite you to type that question into the Question Box. In fact, if you'd like to practice, go ahead and type "hello" into the Question Box and I'll try to say, "hello" to you, so, I make sure that this is working for all of us. It's in the question feature.

Ah, hello Pearl and hello Carolyn, Kristin, Clara, Kimberly, Caridad, Candice, Laura, Vanessa, Sydney, Jessica, Tammy, Jamie, Maya, Christopher, McKayla, Rosa, Cathy, Winona, Karen, Jenny. Nope. Fannie. Rina. Carrie. Hello everybody. Great. Looks like you can hear me and it looks like you know how to use the Question Box.

Joanne, Precious, Jessica, Olivia, Dion. Jesse. Yes. We've got lots of folks here with us today, so glad you know how to include—Lindsay, Susan. Thank you, Jessica. Alicia. Glad you know, how to type in our Question Box. So, I'll do my best to monitor these, but I am gonna kind of toggle back and forth. Yes. And folks can hear me today — hurray! It feels like a good day.

All right. So, we'll conclude our saying hello though. I do appreciate you seeing all of your nice words, and we'll get started with our session for today. I want to let you know that there are two ways to become a member of MyPeers.

The first one is to go to the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center. ECLKC. Put those five letters into any web browser and it will bring you right to this page. This is the official platform of the Office of Head Start, OK? This is where all the official information is shared from Head Start, official resources, vetted resources, resources developed by and for Head Start, official policy clarifications, and policy advice, and information for you to implement in programs. All the official information is going to be here. That is not the same thing as MyPeers. If you scroll to the bottom, you'll see in this quick link section.

We've got some MyPeers, real estate here. You select that page and it will take you to this overview page about MyPeers. MyPeers is a service offered by the Office of Head Start, but it is not the official platform, right? It's a place for you to exchange knowledge, and information, and resources, and ideas with other early childhood professionals around the nation. We are specifically focusing on MyPeers right now as our nation and our planet deals with the COVID-19 challenge, as we, many of us are sheltering in place.

Many of us are social distancing. Many of us are closing our centers, are doing virtual home visits, are working from home. Some of us for the first time in our lives. Some of us, myself included, live in a rural area with very limited internet options. So, we've got a lot of interesting and new challenges, and MyPeers could be one of the tools in your toolbox to help you cope and navigate these challenges.

So, that's the purpose of this webinar today. I'm not going to show you all the basic features of MyPeers, though I will probably dip into a couple of those. I'm going to try to encourage you to consider the ways that you might use MyPeers to support your remote work and to try to, you know, continue the show going on. As you scroll down here, we've got three collapsible menus of our Frequently Asked Questions.

So, you just select that little triangle and it'll collapse that menu for you. And then at the bottom we have three options: "Welcome back." This is for people who already have a MyPeers account who need to log in. "Register to learn more:" These are some upcoming orientation and then advanced orientation webinars that we offer. “Making the Most of MyPeers,” we offer once per month and "MyPeers Orientation,” we offer twice per month.

If you are interested in orientation for your program, I am offering those On-demand right at this point. So, all you need to do is contact me, and I will tell you at least 10 more times how to do that. And I will set up a one-on-one orientation for your program. So far, I have been able to manage the volume of doing that. And so, I'm going to continue to do that as long as I can. The third option here is to create an account.

So, this is one of the two ways that you can start a new MyPeers account. So, whether this is for yourself or for people at your program; however, the case may be, this is how you can sign up for MyPeers. It's very simple form, registration form for new members only. First name, last name, email address, register. Sometimes, you have to do that, “I am not a robot thing” in order to get it to go through, depending on your firewall, your settings. First name, last name, email address. That's it. We typically pull these lists twice a week.

Now we are pulling them twice a day. We are adding new members to MyPeers who fill out this form twice per day. So, you should not have to wait more than 24 hours. Within 24 hours, you will receive an email from Mango Apps. Mango Apps is the company from which we purchased MyPeers and customize it to be MyPeers for us. Mango Apps makes this platform, so you will receive your notifications and your login information in an email from Mango Apps. If you have not received that email in 24 hours, you're going to contact me.

You're going to send me an email: info@mypeers.org. I'm hanging on by a thread to managing all the emails, but so far, I'm pretty sure I've been able to do it. So, go ahead and send me a message if you haven't received, if you filled out this form, you haven't received any mail from Mango Apps in 24 hours, send me an email and we'll figure out what happened.

This form is only good for new members. If you have ever had a MyPeers account, even if it was three and a half years ago when we got started you must contact me to reactivate your account. This form won't work for you. So, go ahead and send me a message, and I will get back to you. I'm going toneed my computer here. All right. That is one way to become a member of MyPeers. When you log into my appears for the first time, you will have to agree to this Code of Conduct. We all have to follow this contact Code of Conduct in MyPeers.

There's over 10,000 of us in there, and we have to follow this Code of Conduct to keep things, honest, truthful, kind, polite, helpful, not attempting to defraud, or do you name anyone, or be discriminatory, or bullying. None of that behavior, no criminal behavior, anything like that. So, that's why we all follow this Code of Conduct in MyPeers. All right. You will navigate a lot from your dashboard in MyPeers.

Ok? So, I'm going to come back to the dashboard multiple times. Going to check in the Question Box right now. And I mostly have hellos, so, OK. No new questions just yet. If you do have a question, please put it in the Question Box and I will do my best to get to it. OK. The other way that you become a member of MyPeers or that you can have other people become a member of MyPeers is to select the people module on the left-hand side. Any member of MyPeers can do this. OK. We only have two types of members in MyPeers. The administrators—that's myself and Marlene—and users. That's it.

There's two levels. It's somewhat a flat structure here, folks. So, anybody can do this in MyPeers. If you're a member, when you go into the people module, come up here, to the tools, and then still select, "Invite people." Here, you're going to put their first name, last name, and email address, and you can do up to 20 at a time. So, we do—[Typing] Put in first name, last name, email address, then click "Add." All right, and you're going to do another one. [Typing] First name, last name, email address, click "Add." See how I've got a list going here. You can do up to 20 of these at a time.

You're going to put a very brief message in here. "Join me on MyPeers"..." or however else you want to, and then you're going to select "Send Invites Now." Those will then have to be approved by either Marlene or myself as the domain administrators for MyPeers. We are doing them as fast as humanly possible. So, it is possible this will be approved for you in less than five minutes. We are trying to approve them. Except for when we're sleeping. We're trying to approve them right away so you can get your staff into MyPeers ASAP. So, if you know someone who was a MyPeers member, this isn't a faster way to be added.

OK? The other way, you have to fill out the form, you have to wait for us to pull the list, and then you have to wait for us to manually create all of those logins and passwords in MyPeers. It is not faster. This is the fastest way, if you know someone. However, if you don't know someone, well, it's really hard to invent knowing someone. And so, go through the ECLKC, fill out the form, and we will get you added. If you have done one or both of these things and you still are having trouble, send me a message: info@mypeers.org.

Send me an email, and I promise you I will get back to you just as soon as I can. All right, so now you're a member. Now your staff are members and you're logging in. When you log into MyPeers, you're going to see your dashboard. There's a few things from here that you can do. One, you're gonna want to update your profile.

OK, roll your mouse over your own name in the upper right-hand corner and update your profile. This is very simple to do. You select profile and timeline, and then you simply click "Edit." You want to update your profile picture. We want to see your picture. If you're not comfortable with the picture, please use an avatar or a cartoon version of yourself. But please update your picture.

The other thing that you may want to do is rolling your mouse over the gear in the upper right-hand corner. You may want to change your settings. Changing your settings will enable you to decide what notifications you get and when. Many staff will only have smartphone, internet access from home. They may not have a home computer or if they do have a home computer, their internet may not be reliable. Or if they do have at home computer with reliable internet, their children may be on that doing their coursework for schools that are closed. At least that's the case in my house.

So, you may want to include them to allow notifications via their mobile phone. I'm going to show you how to download the app so that folks can access MyPeers through the Mango Apps app from their smartphone or tablet. OK. So, you may want to have them update that notification to receive those mobile notifications. Again, I did that by rolling my mouse over the Gear in the upper right-hand corner and selecting, "Change my settings."

OK? I'm gonna go back to the dashboard. Saw a question come in: “Is this webinar only about how to use MyPeers?” No, McKayla. This is about how to use MyPeers for remote work.

Susan: “I can't use my West Cop account to create a MyPeers account.” Susan, you are welcome to create a MyPeers account with any email you like. We have lots of folks using their Gmail, AOL mail, Yahoo account. Any of those are fine. So long as your agency permits it. We have no preference as to what email address you use.

OK. for those of you who don't know the difference, we have Communities in MyPeers. Communities are open to anybody. You can see we have 69 open Communities. They have a variety of different topics. We wanted to make sure to filter for all Communities the first time you log in, or you have to be very sad to see that you're only a member of one community. This is where staff can exchange ideas from around the nation. Right now, in a number of these communities, there are extensive conversations going on about how folks are coping with COVID-19—from health and safety, and wellness to home visiting to Teacher Time. There are conversations in all a lot of these Communities.

The Community that we are all a member of is MyPeers Central, and there are few things in here that might support your remote work in MyPeers Central. All right. And they are mostly located in files. Here in files, you will see we've got a folder of MyPeers training videos. In here, you will see a number of things that might be useful for you. One, this one with the date on it is a recorded webinar. No, somewhat similar to this one. That is an orientation to all the basic features of MyPeers. This one with the date on it, same thing, but in Spanish.

All of the other videos in here are five minutes or less long each, and they give you just a quick run through on how to do something, how to pin a post, how to change your default language, a quick introduction and how to join, how to change your notifications. So, when you forget 90% of what I tell you in this webinar, which of course is natural, these will help refresh your memory on how to do those basic features.

The other thing I have here is a video using MyPeers app. You're going to want to download the app if you have a smartphone, and if you have a data package with that smartphone, it does not take up a lot of space and it does not use a lot of data unless you'd like watch videos on it. But you might want to have that because you'll be able to get notifications. I also have a handout right here, which gives you the step by step instructions with screen by screen instructions on how to download. It's available in the Google Play Store and also the Apple Store. And these are the screenshots from Apple, but it looks similar on the Google Play and it looks just like this.

The one thing you want to be sure to remember is if you download the app, please use MyPeers that mango apps.com as the domain. Right? Because you're downloading the Mango Apps app, so you have to tell it to go to the MyPeers domain. OK. So, make sure you remember to do that. You're going to want to encourage staff to do this if they're still able to get to wifi and download that app. OK. So, these are things that are available in the file section of MyPeers Central. We got lots of things going on in MyPeers Central This is where I post, updates that are relevant for the whole, MyPeers community.

And so, if we go to my feeds here, this is where it looks like a similar to a social media feed, like Facebook or Twitter. We've got a lot of general things going on here, but I'm going to draw your attention... There's some conversations around home visits, poison control. So, this one. OK, so this is the announcement that I posted last week, about supporting your online work. We are happy to set up a work group for you, for your agency, and we can do it pretty quickly. OK. We have already had 31 agencies request agency work groups.

So, I want to show you this first and then I'm going to go show you work groups and how some, how you can utilize some of the features there to help your staff stay connected. Just send me the name of your work group, the name of your agency, your contact information because someone needs to serve as the administrator of the, of the work group. And then if you'll require additional training for staff. OK, so send that information to me in vote MyPeers.org and we will get your work group started. Like I said, we have started 31 just in the past few days. All right, so I told you, Community is—works for everyone, right? They're open, you can go into and out of them. You can check out the resources, you can post, you can ask questions. Work groups are similar except they are by invitation only. You can see up here we have 135 work groups going at this time.

These are all private work groups. You can see in the little padlock there tells us they're private. I'm going to go to my work groups because we've got a test work group that I'm going to show you how it works.

OK, so let's go into test work group. This is how you'll get to your work group, too. If we set this up for you, who would go to work groups and then you'll select the one that is your work groups.

So, this is it. OK. It will look somewhat like similar to this. All right, so it shows you the newsfeed. It's only Marlene and I in this work groups. There's not a lot going on, but I do want to show you a number of these features. First thing you'll have to do is you'll want to add members. So, you select members, and you'll see I'm in this light color menu here that tells me that it's the menu for inside my work group. Whereas the dark color menu out here is the menu for the great big wide MyPeers.

OK, so when you're in your work group, you're navigating in this menu. When you select members, you're going to go over here and invite members. Now, you may only invite members who are already members of MyPeers. This is why I told you that you needed to join MyPeers first, right? You're not going to be able to invite people here unless they're already members.

OK. Now, if you're looking for staff, you can just start typing, right? So, we've typed the name "Melissa," pretty common name. Look, we have all these Melissa's to choose from. OK? So, you can choose any one of these Melissa's and then add them over here, and then you're going to say, "Oh no, I need to add Joanne,” right. Search, Joanne, here are all my Joanne's. And then we add, so you come up with a list of folks who are, you are adding to your work group. So, these are the people who are going to be able to see what's going on in your work group, which is private. OK?

So, you have to invite them to your work group where they won't be able to see it. When you're finished, you may want to generate an update on the work group wall with the name of new members because that'll help you remember who you've added. And then select, "Invite." That will automatically add those MyPeers members to your work group. OK?

 

And so, when they log in, and they go to work groups, and they filter, "From my work groups," it will then appear on their list and they can go right in. If they don't do that, if you don't do that, and they go into work groups, it will look something like this. They'll click on a work group and it won't be able to see anything. See, all I can see is this request to join. So, unless you're absolutely positive that you're supposed to be in that work group, don't select join button because it's like walking into the onference room, and sitting down at a table for a meeting that you were not invited to. OK?

So, you want to make sure that you add all the members to your work group. Or else they won't have access. OK? So, I'm going to go back into my test work group here, and I'm going to try to adjust these questions that are coming in.

All right, Maricha can't hear anything. I really hope this isn't happening again. Marla, maybe, as my co-administrator here may reach out to Maricha. All right. Carrie can hear. So, somebody can hear. Marla, if you could reach out to Maricha, Martha, and let her know, see if we can help her troubleshoot some of that audio, that'd be great. OK. Thank you, everybody, who can hear me. Glad we're all here and listening.

All right, so you come into your work room, you've gone to the member section, and you've added all your members. You may want to create something for them to do when they first get here. The way you add content to MyPeers is through the blue compose button at the top center of the screen. And I like polls because I think it's an easy way for people to participate.

So, I selected "poll" and now I'm going to ask a question. I encourage you to try something low risk. I've encouraged people to do things like, what is your favorite ice cream flavor? Or what is your favorite vacation destination? So, let's try one. [Typing] You're going to customize the responses. [Typing] OK. So, I just made up a couple of them, and then you click create. All right, so now it's over here in my News Feed.

So, in my News Feed you will see... What is your favorite vacation destination? No one has voted because only Marlene and I are in this webinar, but as soon as people vote, right? Here, "View the options." I am going to choose “mountains,” and I'm going to vote. As soon as people vote, I can comment if I want to. Submit. It will aggregate the votes into this little pie chart. It is a super easy way for people to engage visiting your webinar for the first time, excuse me, your work group for the first time. Super easy way for them to engage, and then, you will also know who has come in, so you'll be able to see who has viewed this. OK. You'll be able to see who has voted. So, you'll be able to know and people will say "Well, I went in, there wasn't anything to do." And you can say, "Oh, vote on the poll."

And then they can say, "Oh yeah, I voted on the poll." You can do that. Right? It's just an easy way for them to interact the first time. So, I encourage you to open up a poll or, or something, place for them to comment, in order to get people practicing that first time they come into your work group. All right. Can we set up multiple work groups for one agency? Laura, you can, but I don't, I discourage it. I would say start with one. OK. Start with one. Try to get your folks in there. Try to get them paying attention to the notifications.

Try to get them using the app. We find that the smaller the work group, the less active, and the more frustrated and disengaged that people become. So, I encourage you to start with one, one work group per agency. If you, if it gets really busy in there and you just feel the need, like, wow, we really need to separate some of this out, then we'll deal with it. But let's start with one. Adriana. Do I need to be a supervisor to join MyPeers? No. Anyone can join MyPeers. We welcome you.

We do not screen for where you're from or what you do at all. Can we push content to staff through the work groups such as training content? Carrie, we sure can, and I'm going to show you how to upload content and push that out to staff. You can push that. Well, basically you can push it out to all members of your work group. When you're pushing out information in your work group, your choices are everybody or nobody. Try to keep that in mind. John can hear me, as well. Hi, John, glad you're here. Some people are having some computer issues but are having success using the phone.

All right. Marcella works for Head Start in Michigan. We..."MyPeers is a platform in which we'll get updated info about what's going to happen with our schools and jobs." Well, Marcella, that is awesome for you using MyPeers in that way. To me, it is a super easy way to push out information to all staff at once, especially when you have the kind of agency where it's hard for you to access your email from home, maybe because of your firewalls or because of the, the system that you use. It's a really easy way to get out information to everybody, especially if folks, you know, have really limited technology at home. So yes, I'm glad that you're going to be using it for that reason.

All right. "How do we request MyPeers to start a work group?" Well, Amy, we have made it as easy as humanly possible. "Why can't we create many work groups? Some Organizations have many work groups." Christopher, actually, not a lot of organizations have many work groups. Christopher, actually, not a lot of organizations have many work groups.

And you can, but I would like for you to start with one, start with one, get it going, get it populated. Get folks talking. If you then find that you have the need to set up another work group or more than one other work group, we can work on that, but I don't want to start multiple work groups for multiple—For agencies right out of the gate. one because we have a workforce issue, it's Marlene and I who work on this contract. It's two people, and we're up to our eyeballs, at this point. We are running as fast as I can, and so far, we are keeping up with you. But if we have to create multiple work groups for agencies, other things are going to have to be put on the back burner.

So, we're going to go ahead and go with one per agency for now. And if you feel the need to expand, we can absolutely do that. There are some cases where it may be more appropriate if you're a large, large organization with maybe multiple delegate organizations or, if you cover, I don't know, a lot of territory or have a lot of centers. I was a Head Start director myself with—we serve six counties, including two mountain ranges. So, I know what it means to have a lot of geographic distance.

So, I would encourage you to just start with one and let's make that work. First, I can co-sign on the multiple work groups. It's been planning to get one going. Oh, thanks, John. Yeah, that's pre-COVID-19, I know. I feel like this moment is going to be, a defining moment in our lives. All right, "so what if the maximum number of members for our work group?" Adriana, there is no maximum number. You can pack every MyPeers member in the place into your work group if you'd like to. All right, thanks, Kim. Kim gave me a compliment that we're doing a great job. We are trying, and Dana, I'm glad that you're thinking about using it as a center. Rena, "can anyone in the work group posts that as a part of the work group?"

Yes, Rena, anybody in your work group can post. So, anybody, and this is not a great example cause it's just Marlene and I, but anybody can post in our work group. OK? Anybody can add comments, anybody can do any of those things. The only thing that sets you apart is that you are the administrator. And in here, in members, you can promote other members to administrator. I encourage you to have at least one co-administrator, you know? Especially in these times, you could get sick, you could get, need to be away from home.

Appoint a co-administrator because only the administrators of your work group can add members. But otherwise, everybody's the same. Everybody can see the same things. Everybody can do the same things. We had a question about pushing out training content. In the File section of your work group, you can upload whatever you want. OK?

We don't have any limits on number of documents, size of documents, length of documents at all. You can upload whatever you want here. You can upload PowerPoints, you can upload—in fact, I'll upload something right now that—Oh, here, look, I'll upload this old, MyPeers handout. I forgot I was looking at that. Drag, drop, done. That's how easy it is to upload documents. Now, any member in my work group can view that document that I have uploaded. And over here you'll see the options.

OK, so I've uploaded this document. People can view it; they can share it. They can share permission to it. So, we don't have any permission set, but you can technically set permission so that people can view only. They can embed it. So, they might go post something and say, "Hey, check out this handout that Laura just put in files." They can embed that link to this document there. They can pin it. When you pin things, it's just like pinning it up on your corkboard. It saves it for you for later and you can see pin those all live up here. They can download it, they can upload a new version, they can check it out.

 Once they check it out, they can check it back in and then file access tracking. I can track to see who has viewed it, who has checked it out, who has checked it back in. They can publish it to any of these other platforms. Like if you use Google drive or Dropbox. They can add hashtags to it, just like you do on Twitter. They can move it. So, you could have great number of files here and they can move it into an out of files, rename it, or delete it. Everybody can do all these things with this document.

You can also preview it and then you've got these options across the top of things that you can do with it. OK? So, if you wanted to push out content, you could do that here. You can upload videos; you can upload audio clips; you could upload PowerPoint slides; you can upload documents, or if you any of those things, you can push these out and you can send a notification: "Hey, upload in the new training forms or whatever in files." Go check them out. You can find that notification will go to everybody's smartphone. All right. Let me get back to some of these questions. Only one more.

So, this is the same like SharePoint used by Telemon. Yes, Christopher. Almost all of the features of SharePoint—not totally all of them—but most of them, most of the ones that you are accustomed to using, most of the easy stuff is just like SharePoint here in the File section, and there's no limits, and it's already... private in the sense that only the people in your work group can you these documents.

Now, should you be loading confidential information like people's social security numbers or private information? No, that should not belong in MyPeers at all. MyPeers, it is password protected, but this is not two-factor authenticated. It's not hosted on a private server. It's hosted on the Mango App server. So, you should not put any private identifying, you know, personal information on here, but training documents, forms, you know, if they fell out of your briefcase and someone picked them up on the side of the road, everything would be OK. Absolutely. That can all belong here and MyPeers.

OK, so that is a really useful thing here. Another thing that you can do is you can create events in your calendar. So, I love calendar events for a lot of reasons. I'm going to create one. So, you can see, and in the calendar I'm in an add an event.

All right, so we're going to do... check in. I'm going to put the Zoom badge address here. I obviously don't have link, right now. All right, so we're going to do this. You can set some of these if you want to, and then create. Here it is. Now, once this will appear on the calendar, it'll—Once they go to it. This I created, so you don't see it, but they'll have a chance to RSVP. If they RSVP that they're going, it will do this other really wonderful thing, which is they can use the tools to add it to their Outlook or Google calendar.

So, if they're using, you know, Gmail or something like that to personally to manage their day, you can add it. You can add this event right to your outlook calendar so you can keep all your events in one place. So, I think that is a really handy way to set up events. You don't have to find all the email addresses. Everybody in the work groups invited just like that with one click. You don't have to send it to everybody. Just automatically goes to them as part of the calendar, so it can be a really convenient way. Also, I put zoom address here. You could put a conference call phone number here. Freeconferencecall.com has free conference calling and video conferencing. If you want to use them, you can do that.

Or maybe it's just a one on one check in and so, you put, you know, "Laura to call Melissa." That's fine. OK. You can cancel this event. You can do all sorts of things. I like events a lot, especially that you can move it over.

Another event that you—Another event that you might create is you might create a chat. That is another feature I want to show you here in MyPeers. You can chat with groups. OK, so this is the—Down here, you can see, you can chat with individuals. Or you can chat with groups so you can find your work group—see test work group—and you can start it a chat. OK? so I have started a chat. If you download the desktop app for MyPeers, it makes you this nice big chat window and it will pop up.

OK. It's a little bit bigger than this teeny tiny one over here. You can do a live chat, so you can say, "Hey, everybody log into MyPeers; we're going to do a chat. We're going to do a live chat about how things are going, or whatever you wanted to work on." OK. So, this is a really nice feature. Your whole work group will see these chats though, if they miss these chats, the chats will live in the chat section. OK? You will have unread chats here, so it's not, "Oh, Melissa's not here. She's not going to see this."

Yes, she will. She will see it later because you can see Marlene and I were celebrating something here. She will see it later because she will have access to all of the chats. If they're a member of a work group, they can see everything that happens in the work group. OK. Another—Oh. I got a question coming in. "Can you do a chat with a smaller group of people within the work group?" No. Carolyn, you cannot. You can either chat with the whole work group or you can chat with an individual.

You cannot—You cannot do. We can't say, Oh, we're just going to do these 10 people. You have to either have the whole work group or individual. All right. Another feature that we have here that might make your remote work useful is tasks. You can create tasks in work groups, OK? This will monitor those tasks and, you can have all sorts of wonderful things here if you wanted to. Create tasks, and assign them to people, and monitor their progress on this task, and so forth. OK. The way you do that: Go into task.

Add a new task. OK. So, it might be something like, update your profile picture. OK. You can put it here. You can assign it to everyone. You can maybe, maybe it's do 10 things to, you know, maybe it's get oriented to MyPeers. Watch a video, do a post, vote on a poll and send a chat. Maybe see, select several—Create several checklist items that you want staff to do when they come into MyPeers. Totally up to you, but these tasks can be really useful and then you'll be able to monitor like, "Hey, I thought Melissa logged in and completed all four of her tasks—way to go!" And, "Becky’s still working on that. Right? I see you've logged in. Great job!" Keep on going. OK, so you can create these tasks.

If you wanted to kind of create your own sort of orientation to MyPeers, you could do that. And that would be available to everybody when they log in. When they click on tasks, they're going to see it. It's not a secret list just for you. Anybody who's a member is going to be able to see all of that. OK. All right. So, we've had Marcella. "If I'm getting this right, MyPeers is a platform to be in touch with our organization. But my question is, if MyPeers is an official site in which we could find out about what's going to happen with Head Start program during COVID-19?" No, Marcella, it is not. MyPeers is a service offered by the Office of Head Start in order to help programs connect within the program and also, with experts across the nation, but it is not the official platform of the Office of Head Start.

I would absolutely direct you to the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center for that. OK so, if there's any important information that's going to come out from the Office of Head Start, it will be announced here. And often we sent out through the Head Start communications team, we send out the e-blasts. So, if you have logged into ECLKC, you have registered to receive updates; you will receive those e-blasts through your email to notify you of changes, but that is not the same thing as MyPeers. MyPeers is to help us connect. So, it's just a service offered by the Office of Head Start.

You're welcome. All right. I'm going to pause. I'm gonna, I'm gonna summarize what I just went over and allow you to put some more questions in the Question Box so I can get to those, OK? The first thing I did is I showed you the first way to become a member of MyPeers. Go to ECLK—KC, scroll to the bottom, click on the "MyPeers Quick link," scroll to the bottom there. Select "Join," fill out the form. Usually within 24 hours you're going to get that email from Mango Apps. If you don't, send me a message: info@mypeers.org. OK. Once you log in, there's a—you're gonna agree to the Code of Conduct where we all agree to behave ourselves, and be nice and kind, and help each other, you know. Update your profile information here by updating your profile picture. You are going to change your settings, so to make sure that you're getting notifications that the way you want to.

If you want to create a work group, you're gonna email me, info@mypeers.org, with your name, with the name of the work group you want to create, and the name of your agency, and we will get those cranked out just as fast as we can. We have gotten 31 work groups created just this week. All right. When you want to access your work group, it is here in "Work Groups." Going back to "Add Members to MyPeers." If you're already a member of to MyPeers, you can invite new members. You can see we are rapidly approaching 11,000 members. Up here, select invite people, right?

So, I picked people and I'm picking invite people. First name, last name, email address, select "Add." Once you've got your list of all the people you'd like to invite, go ahead and send them a little message and then you'll select “send invites now.” And that will send them, that'll send a notification to Marlene and myself.

As soon as we approve those which we are trying to do as fast as possible, they will get an email from Mango Apps with their log in information. Again, if there's some hiccup with that and they don't get the email, send me a message, info@mypeers.org, and we'll figure it out. Your work groups live here when you log in. You want to make sure that you're filtering for the work groups that you're a member of—of. Select that work group. Go on in and you'll see, say, "Oh gee, look at this new event we have. Oh, what is my favorite vacation destination? Gee, I'm going to vote on that right now." Right? So, here's, you'll see this news feed.

This is generally where you end up first. Here's where you can add more MyPeers members to your work group. Here's files where you can update information, upload information that you want to share with all of the members of your work group. There's some other things that you could be used for here with poster wikis, but I'm not going to get into that. Here's tasks. If you want to create tasks for people to complete in MyPeers, trackers might be useful, too. And this is a little bit more of an advanced feature, but this is where you can—you can create forms in MyPeers. Look, Marlene wrote me back.

OK. So, getting back to that, I'm going to minimize that for a moment. This is where you can create forms in MyPeers, if that's useful for you. Again, this is a little bit more of an advanced feature. I would encourage you to get comfortable with the other features first, and then you can play around with trackers. And there's a lot of templates from here, or you can create a blank one. Here's the calendar where you can create events. If people RSVP to this event, they can then share that event to their Google, or Outlook, or iCalendar, so they can keep all their events in one place. And you can also utilize chats. So, just like you saw Marlene and I, the whole entire test work group can see these chats. You cannot keep these chats private from the work group; but if you did want to do an individual chat, you could by just selecting one of the people to chat with. OK. All right. One other thing I want to show you that can be useful is we have a number of features that you can access here from this blue "Compose" button, and I would encourage you to check all these out.

You want to explore them. One that can be really useful as screenshare. So, if just you and one other person or two other people want to share screens, like they're saying, "I can't see where to click on this." You can share screens with them. I'm going to choose to share my own screen. You choose “share,” and then you invite participants to participate in this with you. OK? Now, this is gonna use up a lot of my bandwidth at the moment, so I'm going to get out of there. But that feature does exist just screen-share. Yes. You both have to be MyPeers members in order to do it.

OK. Coming back to the questions: "Are the chats archived or recorded?" Yes, they are. Kathy, they live right over in chats. They—they live here. OK. So, you can see two chats from communities that I'm a part of. They live there, and they also live over here in the chat side. So, this, this part up here, that's there all the time. OK. You can always know, "Oh, geez, look, I missed a chat." But then it lives forever in this chat section, in the work group.

All right. Can a full work group be part of that? You must. OK, so if you're having a chat, it includes the whole work group whether you want it to or not.

OK. Is there a limit to how many people can do a screen share? Yes. Jessica, I believe the limit is three total people. So, you plus two others. I haven't done a lot of screen sharing and I've only done it with only one other person, but that's how that works. Yup. I know. If you do, there are a lot of free applications out there for screen sharing and for video conferencing. They are totally overwhelmed right now because the entire planet is online.

But, things like Zoom, and also Free Conference Call; that's the one that I often use. Freeconferencecall.com. They allow unlimited conference calls and, they also will record them for you, and they offer unlimited video conferencing. Yup. GoToMeeting is another one, as well. If you have a GoToMeeting account, you also can use the huddle feature here in MyPeers. So, let's see. Over here, you'll see "Work Group Huddle" is an option. You can start the huddle. That—you first must enable your personal GoToMeeting account. OK? So, you must have a personal GoToMeeting account in order to start a huddle.

 Mango Apps only talks to GoToMeeting for using this huddle feature. So, it's really only relevant if you have a GoToMeeting account. But that's a way to get folks from your work group right into a GoToMeeting. OK? So, if you want to use GoToMeeting. Go to the—you can set up a work group, huddles, you click "Start Huddle." Mine's not going to do it because I don't have a GoToMeeting account.

See? Expired. But if you wanted to, that is how you, you would basically start a GoToMeeting, right through MyPeers instead of sending out the link to the GoToMeeting. OK. So, if you have a GoToMeeting account, you can enable that work group huddle. OK. We have gone through about 45 minutes of content, so I want to open up the conversation to all of you, your questions. Make sure I'm answering those questions here live in MyPeers. Tried to feature the items that will support your remote work. I do want to remind you again, if you have questions or if you need additional training, to go into Communities and go into MyPeers Central.

MyPeers Central is the default Community. There, we're all a member of, and there in files, you will see that we've got those training videos, including the information on how to download the app. And that download the app will be a key component, I think, to staff connectivity.

OK, so here's the handout for the app, and just a little bit down from there is the video on how to do the app. So, aside from these two, with these orientation ones, with the dates on them, one in English, one in Spanish, all of the videos on here are five minutes or less each and they, again, they walk you through exactly how to do that particular feature. Carlethia, there is not a certificate. I'm sorry. We do not give out certificates for our trainings. I'm going to pause here. I'm going to put my contact information up here... and zoom that in for you.

All right. This is me, Laura Hunt Trull, info@mypeers.org. Go ahead and reach me there. I'm happy to assist you. We can set up some one-on-one trainings for you individually or you as you pull your staff together. If you need them to have orientation, we can set those up. So far, I've been able to manage the volume of that and I hope to continue to do so.

In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me and for your interest in this session. I am happy to help you with. Follow-up training if you need it. We are all in this together and I'm so glad that MyPeers can be a part of your solution and helping staff stay connected, helping services to continue and, navigating through this crisis together.

Again, my name is Laura Hunt Trull. I'll continue to answer your questions, but if you have no further questions, thank you for joining me and I will see you on MyPeers. Have a great day.

I'm getting some nice thank you messages in there.

Thank you, Dana, Candace, Andriana, John, Amy, Rosa. Have a great day. Everybody. Kristen, Christopher, Elsa, Donna. Thank you, Melissa, Juliana, Maricha, Gloria, Crystal. Kristen, thank you. Goodbye, Brandy, Melissa, Theresa. It's like romper room. Lindsey. Sarah. Thanks, Bobby. All right. Goodbye, Winona, and Alma, and Maya.

 All right. Jessica, yeah, you're going to want to go into the work group first and then you'll be able to enable the huddle. But first year, once you click it for the first time, it'll prompt you to match your account to it.

Oh, Marcella, gamification level and gamification points. Here's what the point system built in. You accrue points the more activities you do in MyPeers. It doesn't really matter to anyone, though I'm sure some companies maybe use it for incentive or something. But it's just sort of a feature of MyPeers. Carletha, thanks for being here. Oh, Rena, if you're having problems signing on, email me at info@mypeers.org, we'll figure it out. I'm happy to do that. For those of you who are raising your hand, you'll need to type your question into the Question Box. It's kind of the only way that I can see them.

All right. Are there other Mango Apps domain set up? Like MyPeers, Jessica, Mango Apps has all sorts of contracts with all different companies, and I don't know a thing about any of them.

Marcella, thank you. Have a good day.

Bye, Magdalena. Bye, Sarah. Ah, yes, Candace.

We are going to post it on MyPeers just as soon as it's ready. It usually takes a few hours. As soon as it's ready, I'm going to post it on MyPeers and send out a big notification.

All right, goodbye, Jessica. Bye, Teresa. Bye, Pamela and Candace. Thank you.

All right. I think we've come to the end of our session, folks.

Do not see any new questions coming in, so thank you. We're going to close out our meeting.

Have a great day. See you on MyPeers.

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