Getting to Know Google Drive You Can Do

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!

Curation You (and I) Can Do

I took a small break last week from my curation theme and I'm operating more on "summer time" right now, hence the delay in posting. I've covered WHY we should curate & shared a few digital tools you can use in "Digital Curation Tools You Can Do". I followed that with 3 activities you can do WITH your students and why this can be time well spent in"Curation Activities You Can Do".

This week, I'd like to share some of the ways I, personally, have curated resources, ideas, tools, tricks, and much more. Honestly, I am a kind of person who likes variety - not too much - but some. This could be a bad thing for some people, but I enjoy it. Each time I find something new, I find things I like, and don't like, about it. It always makes me rethink WHAT I'm curating and forces me to really think through WHY I'm curating, not just for the items, but also the tool I am using to curate with.

I want to share these photos without an explanation. Don't worry, I'll get to it later. I just ask you to take a look at the 3 photos of shells.

For the past few years, I have been reading, absorbing, collecting, seeking, learning, and being amazed at everything that is out there. Not a day goes by that I haven't learned something and I love it! I had a teacher say to me, after showing some ways to manipulate images and text in Drawings, "HOW do you know all this?" He was amazed each little thing I showed him. I smiled and laughed, and being a tad embarrassed, said, "I spend an extreme amount of time learning and playing with this stuff. I love it that much!" 

There's no way I can keep all of this in my brain, and I've been on a journey to find the perfect system to curate all the good stuff I find.