I'm excited to be back after a 2 week hiatus! This is the time of the summer when my brain really starts to focus in on the coming school year. Today is all about Google Drive. If you are a Google user, you've heard of Drive, and hopefully either you've experienced its power or someone has told you about it.
The best way I can describe Google Drive is an endless filing cabinet. (Ok, to be fair, a personal Google account only comes with 15 GB of storage ... but even THAT is a LOT!) Any Google item you create is stored here ... AND you can store pretty much anything, even if it isn't a Google product here, too.
At the end of each school year, I pop into the 4th grade classrooms and do a Google Drive activity. We talk about the pieces of Drive, we do a little organizing so when they enter our middle school they start off in a pretty good spot, and we talk about some good long-term strategies for using & managing their Drives. I also work with numerous teachers on cleaning & organizing their Drives. IT CAN BE DONE ... and relatively painlessly.
I've broken this up into 2 parts ... "Getting to Know Drive" and "Organizing Drive". Today is the first part, "Getting to Know". I've found that while most people go to their Drives often, they don't always know Drive (especially students!). There are so many options to customize Drive and really make it work FOR you. The first step is understanding the various parts of Drive.
I've made a Slidedeck to help you get to know Google Drive better. Feel free to use it for yourself, peers, and most definitely with students. I've based it off what I do with 4th graders and everything here is appropriate for them (so definitely for you, too!). If you want to use it with younger students, great! You might want to break it up into smaller chunks or just use a few pieces. By 4th grade in our district, our students have enough items that these pieces make a little more sense.
*** UPDATE (July 30, 2019): I added in a Slide to share my thoughts on whose Drive do you display? It all depends on your audience ... students or adults? Check out Slide 3!