The activity stream of BuddyPress is the social hub of our site. When we install BuddyPress, a new page of our public site titled Activity is created. The Activity page acts in a similar fashion to the news feed of popular social networks. From the Activity page, registered site users are able to quickly share updates, comments, and links. This is an incredibly frictionless way for both instructors and students to post content to the class site.

One way in which I have seen the effectiveness of the BuddyPress activity stream is to encourage students to use it to post questions. On many occasions other students will respond to the question before the instructor has even had the opportunity to respond.

Using mentions, we can target replies and comments at specific students and encourage students to respond directly to one another. To mention another BuddyPress user, we simply add @username (with username replaced by the actual username) to an activity post.

Whenever a user is mentioned, they will be notified through the Mentions tab of the Activity page. Mentions are helpful in encouraging student discussion as well as providing a simple means for instructors to direct information to a specific student.