Fab Features of Google Drive

This week I got to spend some time exploring Google Drive, Google Forms, and Google Drawing for my class. Let me tell you, I definitely came away with some awesome ideas for the classroom.

Probably my favorite feature of Google Drive is the ability to easily share access with others. Plus, Google has come up with various levels of access. For example, you can require users make a copy of your document so that they are not mistakingly making edits to it when you do not want them to. You can also alter the level of access someone has to a document. This would be great for sharing documents and other mediums with students.

Something new that I discovered this week is that Google offers several different templates. Within Google Drive, go to the plus sign as if you are creating a new document, sheet, or slide. Hover over the arrow next to the file type of your choice and "From a template" should pop up. 

There are so many cool templates to choose from, but the one that seemed most interesting to me was the book report option in Google Slides. Everything is set up, so all a student has to focus on is the content instead of the design! Here are some of the templates available in Google Slides.

If you check out this video by dottotech, he walks you through the book report template. Additionally, he gives some basics on how to create files and share access with others.

While I love the accessibility of Google Drive, the COOLEST feature is its Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. This means that you can upload a PDF, a scan, or even a photo of text. Open the document within Google Docs, and the text will be converted into a document that you can edit. This works as long as the text is clear. Think of how drastically this can change researching and writing in the classroom! Here is a video from Teacher's Tech that further explains how to use OCR.

And finally, let me leave off with some features I am already planning on using next school year; Google Forms and Google Drawing. With Google Forms, you can create surveys, questionnaires, even graded quizzes with the ease of a few clicks! I made a form for my parents to complete at the beginning of the year that tells me about their child. Now that is one less paper parents have to worry about!

And Google Drawing allows you to create beautiful projects like my graphic organizer for sequencing.

I hope you have fun exploring all of the fabulous features Google Drive has to offer. Please share if you come across something exciting!