Should you use Team Drive?

You've likely noticed Team Drive as an option within Google Drive.  What is it...and should you use it?

Team Drives are meant for small teams who want to share files.  The biggest difference in Team Drive is that files belong to the "team" rather than any one individual.  This means that if the original "owner" of a file leaves the team, the file is not lost (nor can any individual delete the file).

Files in Team Drive can still be shared with others, as in "regular" Drive; however, folders cannot.  Also, subfolders in Team Drive cannot have different privileges than the main folder.  So, for example, you could not have a Science Department folder in team drive for all science teachers, and within that, a Biology folder for biology teachers only.  You also can't choose to nest a Team Drive folder within folders in My Drive; they're always separate entities.

Because of this, my recommendation is to stick to "regular" Drive.  

Please let me know if you have questions about this.

Here's more info from Google.

Viewing/printing photos of students

How can you get a gallery of your students' photos to get to know their names?

In Moodle:

1. Go to Participants
2. Switch "User list" from Brief to User Details
3. Filter for a particular block, if appropriate (under Visible Groups)
4. Click "Show all" on the bottom left. 
5. To print, first select only the data in the table, then right-click and print.

I've made two videos on how to do this:

1. A short version for those who already know how to get to the participant list and filter for a particular block.
2. A full version that explains the entire process.

Please note that the videos are only visible to CVU faculty/staff, so you will need to be logged in to view them.

Note that to view a single student's picture, you can also search for the student in JumpRope.

Layout improvements in Google Classroom

Good news!  Google Classroom now gives you the ability to arrange assignments by topics and to decide the order in which students see them.  This is what many of us are used to from Moodle and other LMS's.  Click Create to make a new topic or a new assignment.

Here's an example from my class:

They've also separated the "Stream" (i.e., discussion forum) onto its own page, so it's clear what's a discussion and what are the assignments for class.  In the next update, there will also be the ability to post resources within topics (for now, you can create resources as "assignments" with no due date).