Turning things in on the cloud: Google Drive organization in the digital classroom

The first time I sat in the computer lab and had kids share writing assignments with me I was so excited. I was going to be able to see all of their assignments as they worked on them. This was going to be awesome.

And it was.

Until my phone blew up.

Please don't blow up my phone, kids.

34 new and unread emails. Each time a student created a new document and shared it with me I got another email saying what I already knew by looking in my Drive. I needed to fix that.

At least I'm not a secondary teacher. Can you imagine? Over 200 emails per assignment. Good grief. Multiply that by the number of assignments, and sections of classes... ugh. It becomes unmanageable pretty quickly.

So I found a way to fix the problem on my own, and now I've seen a few other fixes and Google Ad-ons that can accomplish the same thing.

I created a shared folder and shared it with my students. I could do this easily because I had created a group with my students contact information in it. Creating and sharing a folder one-by-one would be a little ridiculous. Once a folder was shared, anything I put into that folder was automatically shared with the student. No email, no notification, no mess. The same was true the other way around. If a kid wanted to turn something in all they do is put it in the folder, and I don't get 34 emails.

Then I created folders within that folder for each subject. Then I created folders within each subject folder for specific assignments. This Inception approach to organization can get confusing at first. Had I rolled the system out all at once at the beginning it probably would have exploded like my phone. These folders were also great because students were able to collaborate with each other on documents.

There were times when I didn't want to have kids sharing work. Certain writing assignments needed to just be shared with me. Sometimes students need to collaborate on assignments, and other times they don't need to. I needed a folder that was just shared with the student, not with an entire group.

I didn't want to go through, create a folder for each student, and then share that folder with the student. So I had the kids do the work. They created the folder and shared it with me. Sure, it exploded my phone again, but only once. I called these folders my "Turn in folders." Each kid has one.

There are Add-ons that can do all that for you. If I were a secondary teacher, I would definitely look into using gClassFolders, or Doctopus.  I only have 34 students (that's right, Billy is fictional) so it only takes me part of Ocean's Eleven to set up a group in my contacts. I do this right at the beginning of the year so that I can email students and share documents with them quickly. I may play with the Add-ons next year, but so far I've been okay without them. If I had 200 students like my sister that teaches High School Biology, then I wouldn't waste my time creating the folders and contacts on my own.



Today I tried to use an"Inbox" and "Outbox." Inside their "Turn in folder" they have a folder to turn things in, and after I've graded their assignment I switch it over to their outbox.

Billy's Inbox and Outbox

I use class numbers to alphabetize assignments quickly too. Each student has a number, and that way I can organize the assignments by title and find out who has and who has not turned it in.