Shared Areas in Google Apps for Education

[enjay]

We're moving to Google Apps over the coming months, initially just for file storage however I'm sure that email will follow later.

 

I would be interested to hear from any schools who have also made this change, in particular how you handle shared/departmental information.

[Wiebbe]

We have been using Google Drive for some time now and have used two solutions:

 

The first one was simply using a "dump account". We have an account called [email protected] which has a rather difficult password. This account is used only by the IT staff. For all the documents and folders that are shared school wide we create a folder in this drive map, share it with the group "Complete staff". Now comes the tricky part: When you share a folder with a group rather that with users, it will NOT show up on their "Shared items" part of Google Drive. When you give a user a direct share link to the folder or document they will be add it to their own drive folder by using the button that says: "Add to my drive" at the top. You can either email this to all users as a link, or save them all in a internal webpage. Rights/share management will still be applied to this folder!

 

Second came naturally, after a couple of months staff got pretty good at handling their drive and they create their own folders that they share. Be carefull though, if the owner of a folder leaves the school be sure to move the files to a other staff member.. If deleted, all shared folders will be gone as well!

[fiza]

I am sure I read about this in another thread but Google Classroom looks like it will be what most people are looking for.

 

Official Google Blog: Previewing a new Classroom

[enjay]

@fiza - thanks, that's brilliant. We were looking at Hapara ■ Powering Google Apps for Educators, but Google Classroom seems to do much the same, and with Google's very attractive price tag too.

@Wiebbe - so, in effect you don't have shared areas in the sense with which we're familiar from a conventional network, i.e. all Science resources in a single location, you have them spread across the personal Drives of all the Science teachers and just shared out? Doesn't that get a bit unmanageable once every teacher has a folder of Y7 resources or a folder on radioactivity, and each teacher must therefore check lots of different shared folders in order to find what they're after?

[Wiebbe]

@fiza - thanks, that's brilliant. We were looking at Hapara ■ Powering Google Apps for Educators, but Google Classroom seems to do much the same, and with Google's very attractive price tag too.

It seems a great solution for classroom sharing, but so far I have not seen it being usefull for teams/departments yet. I did sign up for it the moment it was released and cant wait to use it though!

@Wiebbe - so, in effect you don't have shared areas in the sense with which we're familiar from a conventional network, i.e. all Science resources in a single location, you have them spread across the personal Drives of all the Science teachers and just shared out? Doesn't that get a bit unmanageable once every teacher has a folder of Y7 resources or a folder on radioactivity, and each teacher must therefore check lots of different shared folders in order to find what they're after?

No! not at all. If you share a folder with multiple people, make sure you give them write/read access. If one person shares a folder, everyone else can just place items in it. Take a look at this picture, this is our IT departments internal drive share. Me and my colleague Winston are the two people that update it the most.

 

http://i.imgur.com/6K2aV6pl.png

 

The folder is owned by my colleague Winston, but I can place any files or even folder inside of it. I still own the files, but everyone that sees the folder can also see my own files. Its almost the same as a plain old samba dump folder actually. Just with more auditing and rights management. You can also finetune the rights per document, ie some are just read only for the rest of team, but editable for me and the teamleader.

[robjduk]

We have been using Google Docs for almost a year now and I chose not to create departmental areas as a central department resource. My reasoning was that I found if you make a master account for a department and the end user deletes the folder then someone has to sign back into that master account and re-share the folder. Does not sound like much to us but I doubted most of my staff were capable of achieving this and I would ultimately end up getting the blame for missing folders.

My view was with 30GB per user, they had enough space to create and share their own items without complicating things.

 

Oh and yes, Google Classroom looks amazing (signed up to hopefully get into the trial) however I bet there are a lot of upset companies because I saw a lot of people selling educational portals which tie in with google docs at BETT this year!

[caffrey]

Doctopus I heard is another (free) alternate, can't comment as I've personally not used it.

The problem with sharing folders and even calendars is that if a new member joins they aren't automatically added to the shares (like windows security groups) I've pondered the idea of using google groups and setting up per department and sharing docs that way (and moving away from old fashioned mailing lists) - just never got round to it and I'm unsure how the staff would receive it.

[enjay]

The problem with sharing folders and even calendars is that if a new member joins they aren't automatically added to the shares (like windows security groups) I've pondered the idea of using google groups and setting up per department and sharing docs that way (and moving away from old fashioned mailing lists) - just never got round to it and I'm unsure how the staff would receive it.

 

We had Google Groups set up at my last school, and used them to share out calendars - that was very simple, and new staff members were included in the rights. Logic would state that the same applies to shared folders, too.

[enjay]

Thanks @Wiebbe I get the process of creating the folder in your own Drive and then sharing it with your colleagues (either by name or by Google Group), but what did they then have to do? I note that you have the folder structure inside your My Drive rather than the Shared With Me section - how did you add it to that? Is it a relatively straightforward process even for the non-technical?

 

Also, I'm surprised by how much Flemish I can understand :-)

[Wiebbe]

That part is actually quite easy. If you share something with a group like in this picture:

 

 

Note the small subtext that says "Editors will be allowed to add people and change the permissions.". Make sure to change that to your preference!

 

They then get an email like this:

 

 

Then you can use the big blue button at the top of the window/page that says Add to Drive to add it to your My Drive! Shown in this picture (red circle..):

 

 

If you send an email, they will get a email with a link included to open the shared folder, afterwards they can either keep using that link to access the folder or add it to their drive to use it.

 

The annoying bit is new users that get added to the group. Even though they have the rights to access the file, they still need to get the link. I suggest gathering those link in one spot.

 

p.s.: Its Dutch

Edited May 13, 2014 by Wiebbe

[enjay]

@Wiebbe - Since all shared and personal folders are in people's Drive, have you had any problems with people exceeding the 30GB space limit? Or 40GB as yours appears to be - how did you get the extra 10?

[Wiebbe]

We came from a 1GB limit for all users, so the initial usage was quite low. Even now, no one has yet to hit the 50% usage of Google Drive. We helped and encouraged people to convert documents to the Google Drive formats: If you store them like this, the data storage is free!

 

The 10GB extra was for using the QuickOffice app on an iPad. You only had to sign in once and you got the 10GB extra for a year or so.

 

[rdk]

We have a slightly different approach where each faculty does have an account with a shared folder (science resources, for instance) that is created within that faculty account and shared with relevant teachers. Teachers move the folder into their My Drive & can then place items in that folder that inherit the sharing rights. As a further step we encourage (and will later try to enforce) that items in the folder have the ownership changed to the faculty account.

 

So Bill Smith has a folder owned by Science shared with him, which he has dragged into his My Drive. This folder has multiple sub-folders corresponding to year levels and topics etc. Bill Smith creates or places a document into one of these folders and everyone with rights to the folder can access it. Then Bill Smith changes ownership of the file to "Science", so if he leaves and his account is deleted the document is still there. This also reinforces that resources created at/for school belong to the school, and are not personal property (Bill Smith can of course take a copy and then transfer that to a personal Google account so he keeps the resource if he leaves).

[enjay]

Hi @rdk That sounds perfect, I didn't know about the ability to change ownership.

 

Is that something which we can enforce (e.g. from the Science Resources account) or do the individual users have the do it themselves? Being really cheeky now, do you have instructions which you give to your staff on how to do this, which I could pinch?

[enjay]

The 10GB extra was for using the QuickOffice app on an iPad. You only had to sign in once and you got the 10GB extra for a year or so.

Must have been a time-limited thing - I've just added QuickOffice, and it didn't increase my capacity.

[rdk]

Hi @rdk

Is that something which we can enforce (e.g. from the Science Resources account) or do the individual users have the do it themselves? Being really cheeky now, do you have instructions which you give to your staff on how to do this, which I could pinch?

 

Sorry - no written instructions. For a faculty account we will create subfolders (ie yr levels/topic) within an overall folder called "resources" or something. Then with the faculty co-ordinator and one or two other faculty members we will login to to the faculty account and share the "resources" folder with them. They drag it from "shared with me" into mydrive & then the three of them start dragging existing resources into the new shared folder. They can each see the new files appearing, and we show how it appears the same within the faculty account. Then its the changed ownership thing, and it becomes clear that the faculty really should be the owner, and that everyone can see the recalcitrant sharers who don't change ownership. After that some co-ordinators want editing rights for everyone in their department, some prefer only one or two have editing rights and the rest view rights.

 

For this to work it requires:

A faculty co-ordinator on the ball who recognises the need for an organised file structure

An understanding that adding or removing something from a shared folder adds or removes it for everyone (ie it is not personal)

A school policy that insists resources need ownership changed to the faculty (it is remarkable how many people are happy to share things, but resist changing ownership)

[enjay]

Thanks, that's really helpful.