One of the functionalities on the Educate Magis platform we were interested in trying out at the Jesuit Schools Network of North America (JSN) this year was the ‘Groups tool’. Although this had existed for a number of years, recent updates made the Groups a lot easier and more user-friendly. We have been using it for the organization and coordination of a number of different group meetings.

For example, I have been using it with my Mission Formation Advisory Committee. We meet virtually about once a month and I have been able to set up our meetings through our Educate Magis Group.

This means all the group members automatically get the meeting invites, can save them to their calendars and receive reminders before the meetings begin. The participants receive the meeting invites in their respective time-zones which avoids confusion around the meeting start time.

We’ve also been using the Group Library to share meeting agendas, documents we are working on, as well as useful URLs. The recent updates to the Document Library, in particular, have made it easier to work together asynchronously from various locations across the United States, Canada and further afield. It is easy for us to upload documents and links, create folders and subfolders and have all our documents in a private shared library with easy access. It has also become easier to move, rename and delete documents so it functions similarly to other platforms we have used such as OneDrive and Google.

The nice thing is we are using our Global Community Platform where we also have access to a wide range of Jesuit Education resources. If you have a group of people who work together online, I would recommend trying out the new and improved Educate Magis Groups. As well as the functionalities I mentioned above, the members of your group will be able to reach out and contact each other directly, set up their own meetings and start asynchronous discussions if they wish.