Guest Blogger Paul Barrette

One of the newest Google+ features is called Communities.

While you may find some of these posts to be interesting or humorous, you can easily turn them off (or reduce their frequency) if you would rather not see them in your Home stream.

One of the most powerful capabilities of Google+ is to participate in a free video Hangout with up to 15 people at the same time.

One of the most useful tools built into Google+ is Hangouts.

There is a pretty simple way to automatically label and filter your Notification messages to keep them from filling up and dominating your Gmail Inbox.

Now that you know what Google+ Notifications are and how to work with them, let's take a look at how to customize and manage which Notifications you receive.

As you use Google+, you will see red notifications appear at the top of the page in the "Google bar". Here's how to view your notifications and clear the red number.

Yet another way to interact with people in your Google+ Professional Learning Community is to "Reshare" posts that appear on your Home page with your Circles.

Another way to interact with people in your Google+ Professional Learning Community is to show your agreement or appreciation by adding a "+1" to a post or comment.

You can join in conversations and discussions with members of your Professional Learning Community by commenting on posts that others have shared.

In order to get the most out of Google+, you should look for co-workers, colleagues, and other interesting professionals to follow.

There is a popular notion that it takes 21 days to create a new habit and I thought it might be fun to break up my introduction to Google+ into 21 bite-sized chunks.

Much of the value of building a Professional Learning Community using Google+ is viewing content shared by the people you are following and actively sharing resources with the people following you.

Since Google has cancelled their Listen podcast app, I've been searching for a new podcast app for Android.