Organizing Your Waves

It's easy for waves to get buried in your inbox, so here are some tips on organizing your waves so that your participants can find these waves easily:

  • Decide on a tag for your class (for example, classname-2010) and create a saved search for this tag. This will help you and your students find the waves created for your class.

Here's a short video on how to tag waves:

If you prefer a text version, you can find the same instructions here. 


Here's how you create a saved search:

Here's a text-only version of creating a saved search. 

 

  • If you are going to cover multiple topics or sub-topics in the class, it's a good idea to create tags for them too. You can add multiple tags to the same wave and participants can search for them in the following way: tag:classname-2010, assignments or tag:classname-2010, getting started. 

Here's a video on how to search for waves:

You can use a combination of search operators to customize your search. For example,to:yourname tag:classname-2010, assignments will help you find waves with assignments you need to comment on. 

Here's a list of search operators you can use in Google Wave.

  

  • Create a Group for your class participants (optional). You can add participants to each wave one by one, but creating a group makes it more manageable. Anyone added to the group later on will still be able to view all the waves the group was added to.

Here's a quick video on locating waves sent to your group:


  • Create a short URL or a redirect for your saved search (optional). If you have a website where you promote your class, create a redirect page to your saved search. This will help your participants access the class waves easily.

If you don't have a website, you can use a short URL service like http://goo.gl or http://bit.ly 

Here's are some examples: