Google Drive & Google Docs

Google Drive is a cloud-based file storage and management solution.  With your Google account you will automatically receive 15GB of storage free.  For most people, this is more than adequate to store everything they have (worth saving).  You can extend your storage capacity for a fee.

Google Drive will allow you to store and manage any files, including many file types that Google Docs does not directly support.  You can store (and view) Microsoft Office files (DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX), Adobe PDF, rich or plain text (TXT, RTF), and all types of image, video, and audio formats.  It will even store, but cannot display, application specific formats (it will store SMART Notebook files).

You can upload and download files or whole folders of files; many file types can be converted to an equivalent Google native format (e.g PPT or PPTX to Google Presentation).


Basic Commands in Drive - Create, Move, Copy, Upload, Download, Convert, Share

Basics of Google Docs - highlights some of the unique features and capabilities

Presentation on Google Drive & Google Documents (From Richard Byrne; its long but useful)

Tutorial Video series from AnsonAlex.com.

Blog posts of "how To" for a variety of specific problems and teacher needs

Although Drive is a cloud-based service, you can use Google Docs offline.  Here's how.


Sharing Files

A very important feature of Google Drive is the ability to share files with other users.

Sharing documents with students - a practical guide



You can share files to non-Google users, although it is a less secure method than within Google.  Here is a short (6 minute) video from AnsonAlex which explains how.