New Google Apps for Education Feature!

Part of my job is to maintain online professional development courses for teachers in our district. We have a Google Drive course that I must comb through periodically to make sure the video tutorials are current and reflect the latest Google Drive features and interfaces. In doing so, I discovered a new (to me) feature that may have escaped notice for you as well!


Did you know that when sharing files in Google drive, you can set an access expiration date? Not available in the free version of Google Drive, this handy feature can be applied by Google Apps for Education (GAFE) users to any file that is shared with viewing or commenting rights. Alas, as of today, you can not set an expiration date for shared access if you're granting editing access. None the less, this is a great feature I intend to start utilizing immediately! Check out how to set expiration dates on sharing settings below:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evaluating Websites

Image
Each Friday, I spend time at the media center of a local high school making myself available to teachers who may need tech help. About a month ago, I was speaking with the school’s librarian and learned that their media center only has one set of encyclopedias available to students. She explained that over the last few years, more and more students have been turning to the Internet for their research needs; very few use the library as a resource for this purpose.  As a “techie,” this was no surprise to me, however, I can’t help but wonder how many teachers take the time to help their students learn how to identify a credible Internet source vs. a biased or hoax site.  Coincidentally, several weeks after my conversation with the librarian, my teammate and I were visiting a middle school in the district and were recruited to teach a lesson on website evaluation. We learned that many teachers are not comfortable with this topic and often don’t consciously know what tactics t
Read more

COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

Image
As the school year ramps up, our department has been busy creating a training module on COPPA and protecting students online. This is a module that all teachers in our District will be taking this year (and likely every year going forward), thus denoting a significant shift in our District's messaging about tech integration and student safety. As part of this module, we created a short video using Adobe Voice that explains COPPA. (You can read more about Adobe Voice in my previous post.) Our goal was to help teachers understand COPPA without boring them with a lengthy written explanation. Hopefully, our little video is less dry than the alternatives.... Similar to other districts, ours has struggled in years past with finding a balance between protecting student privacy and empowering teachers to use professional judgement when selecting sites for instructional use and creating student accounts.  This year, the Responsible Use Agreement that is part of our Superintendent&#
Read more

Sub Friendly Lesson Plans

Image
This week has been a tough week for me. My grandmother, who I'm extremely close to, passed away on Wednesday. Her health had been declining for quite some time, however, after having a wonderful visit with her on Saturday, I never expected that the next day she would slip into unconsciousness and remain that way until finally passing away on Wednesday. I learned of her condition after school on Monday and immediately rushed over to her nursing home to be with her. I took the rest of the week off to keep her company and then to be with my family after she passed. As I had not anticipated being out from work for so long (or at all really), I was not at a good point in my projects for a sub to step in and take over. Of course, most of my classes finished their work my first day out. As I did not know what type of computer skills my sub would have, or even if I would get the same one each day, I needed to write lesson plans that were simple enough for a non tech-savvy person to lead
Read more