Tips and Tricks for Sharing Folders in Google Drive

It’s Tech Tuesday and up this week is Google Drive and the ins and outs of sharing folders.

Google Drive allows you to create and share individual documents, forms, presentations, spreadsheets and drawings. Google Drive will also allow you to upload other documents and files (even videos). In turn you can organize your files and documents into folders.

Like individual documents, folders may be shared with others. This allows everyone with whom you share the folder to view it’s contents (regardless of the sharing permissions on the documents within the folder). Conveniently, whenever you add a new document to the folder, everyone with whom the folder is shared will be able to access the new document as well.

Some Ways to Use Shared Folders

So, how could you use shared folders in your class?

You could create a folder for your class and share it with students to distribute assignments to students by just adding new content to the folder. This could be a great way to share assignment descriptions, templates that you want students to use, checklists/ guidelines/ rubrics, videos uploaded to your Drive, or other reference materials.

Shared folders can also be created by heads of departments or meeting organizers and all Agendas and relevant documents could be housed in them and regularly updated for everyone with access.

These could even be used to replace what you currently store in your Groups folders on the school network thereby giving access from anywhere.

How to share a folder (from The Paperless Classroom )

1. To share a folder, first click on the folder name on the left side of your Drive screen.
2. Now click the down-arrow to the right of the folder name, or right-click on the folder name.
3. From the drop-down (or pop-up) menu choose “Share...” and then “Share...” again.

1. This will open the “Sharing settings” window.
2. Now share with people or email groups and change the privacy settings by giving rights to view, comment, or edit.
3. Note: When sharing folders there is one extra permission setting for editors. By default editors of a folder are also allowed to add new people to the folder and to change the permissions on the folder.
4. If you do not want editors to have these rights, then click “Change” at the bottom of the “Sharing Settings” window.

5. Now select the option for “Only the owner can change the permissions.” and then click “Save”.

6. When you have finished sharing the folder, the folder will show up for the users under “Shared with me” on the left side of their Google Drive screen

A few words of caution:

CC Licensed (BY) by Highways Agency's flickr photostream

1. When you share a folder with someone, they have access to whatever is in the folder. If you move a file or document out of the folder, they will no longer see the document or have access to it.
2. Shared users may move an entire shared folder to their “My Drive” and everything within the folder will remain visible to them. However, if a user moves an individual file or subfolder from the shared folder into their “My Drive”, that file or subfolder will disappear for everyone who previously had access to it. The user will receive a warning and also have a chance to undo this but it is best to not move anything that has been shared with you.

Some Tips:

CC Licensed (BY-NC)
by Will Hastings' flickr photostream

1. To add a file to more than one folder from your "My Drive", for example if you wanted to share the same document with multiple classes, hold the ⌘ command key and select multiple folders.
2. If you set the permissions on folders that you share with others to 'Can view' access then no one with whom you share the folder can remove or add files. This is the safest way to ensure someone doesn’t add or remove content from a shared folder. This is probably the best way to share reference documents with students.
3. Instruct students to not drag files or subfolder folders that are already in a Shared folder to 'My Drive' because it will remove it from the shared folder for everyone with whom it is shared.

Want to Know More?

For more information on how to use folders to share handouts or as a turn-in folder, see The Paperless Classroom document created by North Canton City Schools.

Remember, you might want to have students use a form to turn in assignments. Using a form, they could give you their name, the name of the assignment and the URL of their assignment. This will help you manage work turned in because you will be able to see the timestamps on all assignments and access each assignment from a single spreadsheet. In turn, you can use this same spreadsheet to grade the assignment. For those of you who are interested, this process can be automated through the use of Doctopus.

One suggestion for a Google Classroom Model includes setting up the following three folders for each class: Class Edit, Class View, and individual student Dropboxes.

For example, if you taught 2 classes: video and computer apps, then your folder structure might look as follows:

Class Edit ~ Files in this folder are created by the teacher and are editable by everyone in the class e.g. group assignments

Class View ~ Files in this folder are created by the teacher and are only viewable by everyone in the class e.g. syllabus, templates

Student Dropboxes ~ Files in this folder are created by students and shared only between the teacher and the particular student. e.g. handing in homework

Formative Assessment can be provided directly on student Google documents through the use of comments within the page. Teachers and students can choose to be notified via email when new comments are added or view them as a stream within the document itself.

There are several tools such as gClassFolders that you can use to create these automatically. That might be best to tackle in another blog post...

Want Help?

If you would like any help creating, organizing or sharing folders please feel free to ask.

Happy Googling,

Lara