Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Sharing Google Docs With Your Class

Many users quickly learn to share documents via a users email address, but teachers in the Austin ISD Google domain can also very easily share documents with the entire class or single students.

When you are ready to share a document, click the Share button as you normally would in Google Docs. In the 'Add people' box, start typing the name of the person you wish to share the document with.
In the picture above, we typed 'john' and a list of names that contain 'john' automatically populate the share box. It is very important that our users carefully look at the domain after the @ sign before selecting a name.  The subdomain 'stu.austinisd.org' is only for students.  So, johnsmith@austinisd.org would be a teacher while johnsmith@stu.austinisd.org could only be a student.  Before sharing sensitive documents with other teachers, please check the address fully.

Another subdomain that we have is the 'crs.austinisd.org' domain that is reserved for class groups. Students accounts are automatically added into a crs group by the class scheduling system. Teachers do not need to create these group or manage the movement of students between classes or schools.


In this picture, we see that two different addresses have been selected to share this document with.  The first is a class account. These follow the format,  
CampusCode/Teacher'sE#/Period#@crs.austinisd.org .  Like the other addresses, the crs addresses will autopopulate as you type in this box.

You also have the ability to attach a message with this sharing process.  From this same picture, we see a teacher giving editing rights to an entire class and a specific student.  Students can use the Google 'File- Make a copy' menu to make their own editable copy that they can then save to a collection that the teacher has created for all students in that class.  Collections can be shared in the exact same way as above to help manage student document sharing with the teacher.

How would you use document sharing in your classroom?  Share!