My Take
Google Drive is an effective platform for digital document writing and collaboration. Students can collaborate on documents and presentations, send surveys (Form), create digital graphic art (Drawing), and share their digital work with teachers easily. Teachers have the ability to add comments to student work, track revision histories (to see exactly which student contributed what), and collaborate with colleagues. With live updates of documents, long gone are the days of tracking "versions" of documents sent to you - you always have the most up-to-date version! I strongly recommend Google Drive for all educators!
How I Use It
Students use Google Drive to submit assignments and collaborate on writing and presentations. It will be to the teacher's advantage to be organized in the way they set up Drive and document sharing with students (if you are not using an add-on tool like Hapara).
After coaching a few dozen teachers in setting up Google Drive with their classes, this is my recommendation:
1) Have students create a folder in THEIR Drive (common naming convention recommended, e.g, "Period 2 Jane Doe" or "John Smith - Social Studies")
2) Have students share their folder with you.
3) Create a folder for each class (by subject, period - whatever works for you)
4) Take the shared student-created folders from your "Shared With Me" and drag them into the appropriate class folders
Whenever a student needs to submit an assignment, they should add it into (or create it inside of) the shared folder. This will prevent you from receiving several hundred emails letting you know when a document has been shared with you - the new file will simply appear in the shared folder without all the fanfare). They should set any document they "turn in" to allow you to edit or comment (never "view only" for sharing with teachers).