Thursday, January 03, 2013

Creating Class Folders in Google Drive

Another quick tools post. I came across this great script from Bjorn Behrendt that automatically creates folders in Google Drive from a Google Spreadsheet with a list of student names and gmails and the classes they're in. In the teacher's Drive it creates a folder for each class (separated by period if you have multiple sections of the same prep) with three types of folders.
  1. There's an "edit" folder that all the students in that class and the teacher have edit rights to.
  2. There's a "view" folders that the teacher has edit rights to but the students just have view rights to.
  3. There's individual "dropbox" folders that each individual student and the teacher have edit rights to (the teacher sees all the dropbox folders, each student just sees their own).
In each students' Drive they'll see three folders - the edit folder, the view folder, and their individual dropbox folder.

While you can do this manually, it's really nice for teachers with several hundred students to automatically create and organize these folders from a spreadsheet that can be easily populated by exporting from your student information system (Infinite Campus for us). Here are the instructions I shared with my teachers in case any of you find it helpful.

5 comments:

  1. thanks for sharing such a usefull important

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  2. This is a very cool workaround. It is much easier though just to use Hapara's Teacher Dashboard! The schools in our district K-12 all use Teacher Dashboard and it enjoys 100% support from the teachers as it just makes using Google Apps with students/ classes so easy. Our teachers made a short video about it and put it on YouTube - excuse the Kiwi accents :)

    Dorothy

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  3. I do prefer having them submit projects to me via shared folders on Google Drive, since I can link it to my Gmail account that I use for that specific class. Although, there is still no alternative for the more sensitive information than on a stand-alone device such as an encrypted flash drive for security purposes. Though my question is, how does it compare to other online file storage (i.e. Dropbox) in terms of file syncing?

    Nannie Salyards

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  4. It appears the suggested template is not available anymore..

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    Replies
    1. @Kevin - it's been replaced by Doctopus and/or Google Classroom.

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