Have you tried Google Drive?

My school district has started a push for all employees to use Google Drive. As everything is in education.. innovation starts with a lot of talk and more talk and then we start slow, get scared, bury our head in the sand, desperately claw at the past and then when we are finally thrown off the edge, we see that it wasn't so bad and the "cliff" was only about a foot and that instead of drowning, we could just put our feet down.

Okay.. so that's a lot of cliche, but you get my point. Innovation doesn't come easily in education.

Well, Google Drive is a game changer. 

Here is my Google Drive for school. I have created all of these folders in the past couple of months! 

Each of the header bars is a folder. Inside each folder there are numerous documents or in the case of my class folders, I have student folders. I can't show you a class folder as my student names are listed on each file, but here is the inside of my instruction and guides folder.

What is so cool about this is that because I made the folder searchable, I was able to give the students the link to the folder (I made a tiny url) and they added my folder to their drive. So anytime I create a new guide, or as I add more guides to the folder, their folder is automatically updated!

From a work management perspective, this is a game changer.

Here is the folder of one of my student's in Art 1. As he completes his assignments, he loads his work into his folder. Because he has shared it with me, I can see his work in real time. 

And, because he gave me "can edit" rights, I can have him drop stuff into his folder from my ipad without him having to log into google.

Storage is unlimited, so while some folders like the above one only have 6 items right now, one of my folders has 168 photos! Multiply this by 160 students and you can imagine the amount to storage that would be needed for me to keep all of my students work on my device. 

So there you have it. My ringing endorsement for Google Drive. And fyi... if you haven't tried Google Docs yet, you should!