There seem to be two camps in our school district when it comes to Google Drive, those who love
it and have embraced it, and those who don’t understand how it works and treat it as if it is some magical place. To try and clarify it for the second group, I’ll start out by asking how many of your use the shared drive at work?
Many of the people who have shown concern over the idea of saving files to the cloud have no qualms about saving files in our shared drive, an offsite server, which is pretty much the same thing. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing tips and tricks on how to use some of the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) such as Google Docs (think MS Word), Sheets (MS Excel), Slides (MS Powerpoint), and Forms. While there are quite a few differences between the Microsoft and Google versions of these programs, and while the Microsoft versions are far superior in some aspects, many people won’t notice much difference switching from the old standby to the cloud based GAFE versions.
I’m going to start out by discussing the fact that GAFE programs have one thing going for them right now that Microsoft doesn’t, at least not unless you have MS OneDrive, with any of the Google suite of programs, you have the ability to share various rights with people. You can give people access to view the document, comment on the document, or edit the document. In our current shared drive, many people can access the document, but only one person can work on it at a time. If someone else has the document open, you cannot access it until that person closes it down.
Finding Google Drive
All of the GAFE programs can be accessed from within your Google Drive. You can find your Drive . If you're logged in, it will take you directly to your drive, if not, it will ask you to login first. If you're using the Chrome browser, the second way would be to click on the icon for your Google Apps in the upper right hand corner of your screen. From your Google Apps options, simply click on the Drive icon to go to your Drive. From this menu, you may also choose to go directly to one of the other GAFE programs.drive.google.com
in one of two ways. The first way would be to go to
Coming up in my next post will be an explanation on how to share your file once you've created, or saved it to your Google Drive.
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