Week 2: Google Drive

Hope you all had a glorious first official week of summer!

This week, we are going to spend a little more time getting to know Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs).  Google Drive is part of our Google Apps for Education suite of tools.  You can access it by logging in to your BMS email and clicking "Docs" in the black bar across the top.  If you have already switched over to Drive, then your bar will say "Drive" instead of "Docs."  If you simply click my link above, you'll be asked to log in; be sure to use your full BMS email address for the userrname!

Google Drive is an online file creation and storage tool.  You can create most documents that you are used to making with Microsoft Office, including docs, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Why not just use Microsoft Office?  you make be asking.  Well, there are two main reasons:

1. Google Drive stores your files online so that you can access them from any computer with internet access (Each person has 5GB of non-Google file storage and an unlimited amount of Google file storage).

2. Google Drive allows you to share your files with others and work on them collaboratively!

For this week, your goal is to learn all that you can by exploring Google Drive.  Make a doc or a presentation or even a spreadsheet, and share it with someone else or a few people--you could ask your colleagues on Twitter!  (Sharing with a BMS colleague is very easy, as their email addresses are already in your address book).  Then, practice using the collaboration features, like highlighting and making comments on a certain section and chatting about the document within the creation area (on the right side).  Though you don't have to view the document at the same time as your collaborators in order for these features to work, it's fun to see someone typing in the document while you're looking at it!  In your document, you and your collaborators can discuss ways that you could use this tool in the classroom, with students or with colleagues. 

You can also download a desktop "client" for Google Drive that allows you to easily add files to your Google Drive storage area from your computer.  You can upload any file types to Google Drive, including photos and videos!  Give it a try!

If you have even more time to play, try this: collaborate in a Google Doc with Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe!  Click here to give it a try.

Also, here's a funny video spoof of Hall & Oates using a Google Doc to collaborate on the lyrics to a song.  It gives you a good visual of how the real-time collaboration can work.


If you get stuck, try to find the answers to your problem on Google's support page for Google Drive.   

Have fun and be sure to share your successes and struggles with us on Twitter!  You can see what all of your BMS colleagues are up to by clicking on the link on the right hand side of this blog called "List of BMS Twitter Users."  Just subscribe to the list!

Next week, we'll keep exploring Google Drive, but will shift our focus to Google Forms.  If you like using Survey Monkey, you'll love Google Forms!  Tweet with you soon!