Living In The Cloud: Google Team Drives
Google making it even easier to share your documents with your colleagues.A new feature for the Cloud based giant
I wanted to share a pretty recent feature added to many Google Apps for Education users and districts. Most people are pretty well-aware of the power of Google Drive, but in the last few weeks they actually added some functionality to the platform. This comes in the form of Google Team Drives. The name itself is pretty intuitive and self-explanatory – it allows you the share a common Drive space with your team.
This is helpful because it takes away the need to constantly share folders and files with others you frequently work with. By using Team Drives, you simply need to create or add the document within that Team Drive and it is instantly accessible to all others in the Team Drive. I find this super helpful in working with district counseling teams, school site teams, counselor/registrars, etc.
To get started with Team Drives – check to ensure you have access. If you do – you will see the link right under your My Drive line when you log into Google Drive. Click Team Drives and then you will need to either be invited into a Team Drive or start one yourself. After clicking Team Drives – click New and name your Team Drive. Then invite the other users you would like to collaborate with in this particular Shared Team Drive Folder. Those users will have full access to edit and change the files in the Team Drive to start. If you wanted to change access levels – you can click on Members and edit individual access policies.
From there – simply use like you would Google Drive by adding folders, Google Sheets, Forms, etc. I recorded a quick video above as well to show you what this looks like when you use Google Team Drives. I hope you get some great use out of this new feature. If you don’t have access to this – you may want to talk to whomever is in charge of your IT or Google Apps platform.
Your presentation on using team drives is very informative and extremely interesting. It seems like a fabulous tool for sharing and communicating with colleagues and members of Professional Learning Networks. Using technology in outreach to learners is one of my areas of interest. Your use of technology in this regard is fascinating to me. What are your limitations in using technology with contacting students? Are there any ethical concerns with using technology to communicate with youth? Can technology be used at all to reach out to learners about social/emotional issues?
Thanks – there are some obvious limitations regarding potential access, home internet access, and such. My school is 1 to 1 so they all have access at school. I use a multitude of different mediums to communicate with students and parents. I think that we, as schools, must also start to emulate the way that society and working world communicates – which is ever increasingly through the technology realm. You always have to be aware of privacy policies and hosting sensitive student information in electronic storage. There is typically a tool that is created specifically for or can be adapted to meet most of our needs. Somethings are best left for the “old school” method of the post, personal call or a conversation. That is where we use our best judgement and experience to guide us. Cheers! ~Jeff