October 13th, 2009
Shared folders make Google Docs even better for teachers
Google’s announcement yesterday that they would support shared folders in Docs came as welcome news to a lot of folks, but particularly to teachers who have been looking for better ways to share large numbers of documents with their classes.
While it’s been possible to create groups of contacts and share documents en masse in that way, management of all of these documents can quickly become an issue. Especially where users are sharing entire libraries of PowerPoints, quizzes, exams, review materials, outlines, notes, etc., all it would take is a simple folder structure, with sharing at the folder level to clean things up. This is actually Microsoft’s approach on their Skydrive/Web Apps; they don’t allow sharing at the document level. Now, users of Apps can have the best of both worlds.
As described on the Google Blog,
To share a group of items, all you have to do is put them all into a folder and share the folder. As you’d expect, if you add an item to a shared folder, it will automatically be shared and if you add someone to an existing shared folder, they will instantly get access to all of the folder’s content.
We’ve also made it easy to upload multiple items to Google Docs. Instead of picking one file at a time, our new upload page lets you choose multiple files and upload them simultaneously, in just a couple of steps.
Needless to say, users who had painstakingly uploaded countless files and shared them at the beginning of the year when we fully rolled out Apps were a bit grumpy to hear this news, but are happily eying future uploads and next semester.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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