How Can Teachers Use It?
For classroom use, power users may need more than formatting, formulas, and animations, but Google Drive should perform most of the functions you and your students need. You get a word processor as well as spreadsheet and presentation tools. Add the ability for multiple users to simultaneously edit documents, and you have a real tool for collaboration. The days of passing a draft back and forth or navigating MS Word's Track Changes feature are over. Each user can see the colored and labeled cursor of every other user while they work on an essay, a spreadsheet, or a class presentation. There’s even a window for chatting while you work. Projects ripe for Google Drive might include writing workshops, group projects, class discussions, and peer review.
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What's It Like?
Originally called Google Docs, Google Drive is a combo online-productivity software suite and cloud-based, file-synchronizing service. Basically, it does everything and lets you put everything somewhere. Each student needs her own Google account to use Drive, which requires an email address. From there, a user simply clicks on the Create button and chooses the type of file to create. Documents can be arranged in folders, and you have complete control over how the file is shared (read-only, password-protected, or completely private) and with whom. The Upload button allows you to add files to the 5GB cloud storage (Google Docs don't count against this total), and they automatically sync to any device with the application installed (iOS, Android, Chrome, desktop).
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Is It Good For Learning?
The office apps alone make Google Drive a fantastic free tool for your students to complete and collaborate on assignments. They won't exactly learn anything besides, perhaps, how to expertly use tools they may already be familiar with, but the tool will help streamline their learning on other topics. Most functions are pretty intuitive, but the help area provides lots of advice when needed. One big drawback for classrooms with multiple users sharing a device: there's isn't a sign in/out feature. If students are using their own accounts, they'll need to add and then delete accounts each time they use and then stop using a device. Otherwise, every account that has accessed the device will be accessible by all subsequent users of the device.
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Drive's interface is similar to many other Google products.
Drive provides many document types.
The word processor is very similar to many desktop tools, with fewer options.
The spreadsheet tool has all of the necessary functionality of MS Excel without the bells and whistles.
