Google Drive (Part 1 of 3)

There are few tools that I have found that have helped my personal and professional productivity more than Google Apps. For years I have been suggesting using Google's offerings (Drive, calendar, Blogger, etc) with mixed success. If you are one of those people who were hesitant to try Google before, or tried it and hated it, I urge you to give it a second chance, specifically Google Drive.

The benefits of using Google Drive for teachers and students are plenty... far more than I can list but here are what I consider the big players:

• It saves automatically to your own password protected account... every five seconds.
• Unlimited storage for items created in Drive and a lot of storage for other documents you just want to store there.
• Access everywhere you can get online ~ no more flash drive at home while you are at school.
• Users do not have to have the Microsoft Office suite on their computers. If a student does not have Office on his or her home computer, how can he or she finish a project at home? If the user has started a project in  Drive, he or she can access it as long as the Internet is available. Options are good!
• Collaborating is awesome! Multiple users can work on the same document, at the same time. Bye-bye to the workload falling on just the motivated in the group or bye-bye to the project get hung up based on one person's slacking effort! Also, students can share a document with a teacher, who can then comment on it. No paper passing required... less clutter is a good thing!

Of course there are negatives; there are always things we would like to see work differently or better. The big one is needing Internet access and that isn't always available. Another struggle is students forgetting their passwords,  however, the requests for passwords to be reset diminishes if users use a program on a regular basis!

Tips to improve your experience & updated tools:

~ Browser choice matters!  If you haven't ventured out of using the big e to get on the Internet, now is the time. Google Drive works best in Chrome. Why?  Because they both products of the same company and are updated with each other in mind. But Chrome isn't the only choice; I often use Firefox for my Internet browsing and have had little or no issues with Google Drive doing so. My experience with Internet Explorer hasn't been as positive; they may play nice for a short time but then there is an update to one and everything goes wonky. Stick with Firefox or Chrome. 

~ Printing. Back a few years ago we had students here completing a report in Drive. When we went to print, the margins, the spacing, and the formatting was a disaster! Students ended up downloading to Word and then spending time reformatting their lengthy appears. What a waste of time! Now downloading to Word is still an option but clearly there have been improvements because now what is on the screen is what prints! Yay! What I have noticed is if you are in Firefox (and IE though we have stopped using that one for Drive, remember?) you will have to open your document as a pdf and then print (you are gently walked through this, no worries). If you are in Chrome, you can print directly to your printer.

~ Google's presentation option is best described is a simplified version of PowerPoint. There are limited choices of themes and the animation options are basic, but while students often grumble at the lack of bells and whistles, less is more in my opinion... more time spent on content during the creation and more focus on the speaker during presentations. Let them complain!

~ When you create a spreadsheet in Google Drive you can also graph the data, just like you would in Excel. A few years ago I was hesitant to recommend using Google over Excel because I found the process quirky. With the changes to both programs in the past few years, I now find them both excellent, and for students, I think Google's is a bit more straightforward.

Don't forget to contact your ITRT for assistance before, during, or after you try any of these suggestions! 
We want to help!

Google Drive's document options tomorrow!