Google Drive: The Basics
Go here: --> drive.google.com
-What is Google Drive? Google’s Cloud service: Create Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, Forms (Surveys) and more! Anything in your drive can be edited by up to 50 users at a time! You can even upload images, photos, gifs, and Microsoft Office files and automatically convert them to “Google Docs”
- Oh, and if you are a Google Apps for Education district, you now have UNLIMITED storage in your Drive!
The Basics:
Create a document by clicking the big, red “NEW” button!
- create Folders (sub-folders, too!) Docs, Sheets, Slides (then click “more”), Forms, or Drawings
Looking for a fun way to show your students how collaboration works?
For Beginners:
~ Everything is SHAREABLE (including folders)
~ Try formatting a doc the same way you would in Word.
~ Digitally “Share” a document with your students (or have your students share their work with you!). If “Google Contacts” are turned on, it’ll auto complete student email addresses, too!
~ Have multiple students working on the same document at the same time
~ Have all of your students’ Google Accounts on a spreadsheet; share that spreadsheet with all of your team teachers and students so they have everyone’s account.
~ Create an assessment for your students using Google Forms, score it using Flubaroo.
~ Upload all of your Office 365 files to G-drive, it’ll convert them for you!
For Intermediates:
-Have a shared “Class Folder” that contains “view only” docs/images/study guides that your students can access throughout the year.
-Interactive Presentations (Research Topics)
-Work with a team of teachers? Create a new doc from a template each week that can become your “Common Lesson Plan”. Have everyone contribute to it.
- Reading Comp Practice: copy and paste a passage (make sure to cite properly!) then paste link to a Google Form with questions down at the bottom
- Run a class government? Having a class meeting? Have a student “Take the minutes” in a public Google doc that you can share with the world.
For the Advanced:
-Your students don’t have access to email, but you want them to fill out a Google Form? Paste a link to it on your classroom website, and have students access it through there.
-No email accounts for your students? Publish your Google Doc to the web or make it “Public”
-Fill out a form and have the results of it sent directly to parents using the Autocrat Add-on (Think about using this as a weekly behavior report/progress monitoring).
-You can embed student docs, presentations, spreadsheets, very easily with the “embed” code. Here’s a sample project my students and I created using Google Drive and Blogger together.
-Teach Social Studies? Using Google Drive for Primary Sources
- Text of the Declaration of Independence
-Substitute plan like a boss. Feeling sick one morning and don’t want to drive out to your classroom? Always have an icon on your school desktop computer to a Public Google Doc that says “Sub Plans”. Have it be a link to a Doc that you can edit from home.
-Put the internet to work for you: make a doc “public” and then tweet its link out on Twitter. Put an in-class question at the top of the doc and watch it fill in. (Just make sure you use a educational hashtag with your tweet! #edchat, #KyEdChat, #sschat, etc...)
But how do I easily use this with my students? Google Classroom, my friends