How to Get Your Classroom Ready to Use Google Drive

This year, our district opened up Google Drive for our elementary students. As you may know, the use of Google applications allows for the easy creation, storage, and sharing of documents. Questions like, "How will my students turn their work in?" and "How can I share documents with the students?" come to mind. Of course, having a classroom of 5th graders setting up various folders with a variety of sharing permissions can be a real headache. I found a great tool, called gClass Folders, that helps to cut back the amount of time it takes to get your classroom set up in order to effectively use Google Drive.

Below is a video that demonstrates how to set up your classroom to use Google Drive. It creates a number of folders in your own Google Drive, so you own any work that is in them. One folder is set to be a view only folder, a great place to share documents and examples for students to sift through. Another folder is set to edit. In this folder, students would be able to collaborate on documents together because they would all have editing privileges. And finally there is a "Dropbox" folder. Within this folder each student has a folder that only they can modify. This is where they turn their work in electronically.