Recreating your “Desktop” in Chrome

Recreating your “Desktop” in Chrome

 

It’s a bit different, but just as effective.

 In addition to being able to use colours on folders to assist with organizing, there is another handy trick.  You may have already discovered this, but if you haven’t tested this out yet, it’s how I replaced my desktop when I became a Google Educator.  You can right click on anything in your Google Drive (folder or individual document) and you will see that one of the options in the fly-out menu is “Add to Starred”.

     

    Anything that you add a star to will appear on the left side of your drive when you click the link that says “starred”. As a teacher, I always starred the unit I was currently teaching so it would be quickly available, then I would unstar it at the end of the unit and apply the star to the next topic. If you look at the following image, this is what my “Starred” drive presently looks like:

    When I was teaching I always kept other frequently used documents in there (the Google doc with the ongoing staff meeting minutes, the list of classroom phone numbers, the detention room supervision schedule). Essentially it was the functional equivalent of my windows desktop.

    And one last thing – don’t forget it you swipe upward from the lower portion of your touch screen chromebook you have shortcuts to a myriad of your Google resources – there are shortcuts to things like Drive, Kami, Read and Write and many other extensions, including extensions you’ve added yourself.

    Organizing Google Drive

    Organizing Google Drive

    Tips to assist with organization in Google Drive

    There are a few things you can do to assist with organizing your Teacher Resources in Google Drive. You don’t need to do all of them, but to construct your individual workflow, considering the following may be helpful.

    1. Create a folder and call it “Archive” – put resources you are not presently using, but may need in the future into this folder. I openly acknowledge that I am a bit of a digital hoarder when it comes to teaching resources. Teaching assignments can change from year to year, as we all know, and so deleting content can be a challenge, but we also want to not have digital clutter. If we are moving, it’s a great opportunity to purge and organize.
    2. You can set colours on the folders in your Google Drive. If coloured folders will give you a visual to aid in organizing and retrieving, by all means…. right click on the folder and select a colour!

    3. You can also mark folders or documents with a star (right above the “change color” option) and henceforth when you use the “search” feature of Drive, the starred items will be boosted to the top of the search results. Additionally, on the left-located menu, beneath “My Drive” and “Team Drive” is a label “Starred” – if you click that, it will shortlist all documents you’ve applied a star to!