Resource Links

Access form

• This is the access form for the CDW Education Collaborative.
• Within a few hours, you should get an email with more details.
• Your collaborative membership is for your entire organization, so please send this form to everyone in your organization who should have access to the Collaborative!

Online community basics

• Invision is the hub of the collaborative, and can be accessed at collab.amplifiedit.com. Please bookmark or pin the tab, since everything happens here.
• If you cannot log in and have filled out the resource form, you may need to configure your google domain to allow API access. Please find directions to that here.
  If that still does not work, please contact [e-mail]
• Navigation:
  
  
  • The Welcome & News Section contains the Getting Started channel, as well as the Introduce Yourself subchannel.
  • The Collaborative Platform Support channel is your go-to if you have questions about the online community platform.
  • Announcements are where we will let you know what special events are coming up from CDW Amplified.
  • Below that is Discussions, the discussion forums, where you can read and communicate with fellow Tech admins on a variety of Google-related topics.
  • Below that is our Our Picks, our promoted content, which are hand-selected by our team to be timely and relevant.
• Posting and Commenting:
  
  
  • You can make a post by using the big green Start new topic button in the channel you want to post in.
  • Give your post a name, write a few words, and hit submit! That’s it.
  • If you go to an existing post, the green button will instead say, Reply to this topic.
  • You can write any kind of reply you’d like, and hit Submit reply to reply.
  • You can also react to the post or individual comments, and mark as solution.
  • Mark as solution makes the reply stick out, so If you ask a question and someone answers, be sure to mark it as a solution to make it easier to find!
  • You’ll notice that there’s a slider that says Follow for following this topic.
    
• Following a topic/Notifications:
  
  • You get to control what posts you would follow, and how the online community sends you notifications.
  • After clicking the Follow button, you’ll get the choice to receive a notification immediately, or to receive email digests.
    
  • If you go into your notifications settings, you can choose the defaults for entire categories of notifications.
    
  • If you just want a list of all your followed content, you can go to “Manage Followed items” after clicking on your profile in the upper right. You can also access it by going to Mange Followed Content and selecting Topics.
    

Online Community Advanced

• Quoting:
  
  
  • In a reply, you can quote other members.
  • Clicking Quote will include their entire post in your reply.
  • You can also highlight and right-click Quote to only quote part of the reply.
  • Finally, you can also multi-quote, which is the plus button.
  • Multi-quote allows you to collect multiple posts and insert them all into a reply.
• Other Views and Activity Stream:
  
  • In addition to the default table view, you can also view our homepage in grid or fluid views.
    
  • Grid view shows more details about each space, while Fluid view shows a timeline of all recent posts.
  • Another way to view the community is through activity.
    
  • The Activity page shows a timeline of all activities you do on the site, including every post and forum you follow.
  • You can also create custom activity streams, where you can select exactly what kind of activity you want to follow.
    
• Searching: 
  
  • There is a search bar you can use to look for forum topics, previous live streams, or anything else you could want.
  • [[screenshot of search bar]]
  • If you click right before the magnifying glass, you can select where you want to search.
    
  • After making a search, you can turn on advanced searched options by clicking More search options.
  • This menu lets you to search through any part of the collaborative for text strings.
  • You can change to searching only within forum posts or blog posts, by time, and more!
• Dark Mode:
  
  • If you prefer a lower light experience, you can toggle between light mode and dark mode here
    

Events

• Part of your Collaborative Membership includes access to our collab-exclusive live streams.

• Live streams are run on BigMarker, and you will be getting invitations in your inbox. You may need to add [e-mail] to your email allow list.

• An alternate way to register for events is to find the event on our calendar. This will require you to have created an account on our online community, which includes filling out the access form. 

• If you click Events, it brings you to a calendar of our next events.
  

• You can use these to find the date and time of our next events, and to signup.

• There are alternate views of this interface, just like with forums. You can view Overview, as well as Monthly, Weekly, and Daily events.
  

• Just like a forum post, you can also choose to follow a calendar, from the monthly view, which will alert you whenever a new event occurs!

• Past Livestreams:

  • All past live streams are time stamped and accessible if you click Livestream Archives along the top bar.
    

  • If you are looking for a specific topic we have covered in the past, the livestream archives are searchable.

  • Simply set the search to search within entries and you’ll search only the livestream archives.
    

Newsletters

• Also included in your Membership are once-a-month newsletters

• Typically sent during the fourth week of a month

• It will summarize that month’s livestreams, as well as give some insight into popular topics on the collaborative.

• If you are a member and are not receiving the newsletter, please let [e-mail] know.

Document Version	Date	Description of Change
1.0	2/8/2024	Image replacement for CDW Branded collab
1.1	3/12/2024	updated name and link to CDW Education Colab
1.2	7/22/2024	Rewriting with Beth, reverified