Setting up a Team Drive in Google Drive

Teaching is all about collaboration, and Google makes collaboration so easy with it's relatively new feature, Team Drive in Google Drive. This feature is available not only in the GSuite of Apps for Education, but also for their Enterprise accounts.

I LOVE Team Drives! I'm a middle school strings teacher in a very large school district that splits itself into "Districts", "Regions", and then "Pyramids". I know, it's a lot of organization, but my district has over 180,000 students enrolled, and is the 10th largest school division in the U.S. So you can see why we are organized in so many different ways.

I had the pleasure of hosting Junior and Senior District Orchestra Auditions this year (I know, what a job for someone brand new to the school district!) at my middle school. Because of this, a lot of data needed to be collected in a very official way, and organized so that multiple school directors could access the information. The best way to organize this information was through the use of a Team Drive.

The main reason why Team Drives are superior to a shared folder in someone's personal Google Drive is because the content does not get deleted when the creator leaves the drive (an example of this would be they moved to a different school district or retired). The files still live on in the form of a collaborative team drive, even if their "Schoogle" account (what we call our school google accounts) has been deactivated.

Here's how to set up a Team Drive to allow for multiple educators to collaborate together:

1. Log into your School's Google Drive account drive.google.com

2. On the left, click Team Drives under the My Drive icon.

3. Click the + New icon and create a name for your Team Drive, and click the blue Create button.

              

4. Add members to your Team Drive. Google may prompt you with a message that gives you a guide. Click the text "Add members" under the search drive bar at the top of your team drive.

5. This is where you must be careful, some school districts will not allow you to use a Team Drive with outside email addresses. For example, my school district does not allow any collaboration with people with email addresses outside of our domain. Your school district may allow this, but be sure to always check the up to date district policy regarding this. Here's what happened when I attempted to share the Team Drive to my personal google account.

6. Be sure to set the settings for each member's access to the files. You can be as granular as you want. It's a good idea to set more than one person as a "manager" in the event one of the managers of the team drive eventually leaves the district.

Manager: Can manage members, and upload, edit, move, or delete all files.

Content Manager: By default, can upload, edit, move, or delete all files.

Contributor: Edit all files and upload new files, but can't move or delete files.

Commenter: Can only comment on all files.

Viewer: Can only view all files.

The cool thing is, if there are multiple managers in your Team Drive and the creator leaves, the files remain. Even though "Michelle" left the Team Drive "MUSIC | District Orchestra", our files are still very much active and all of the collaborators can use the Team Drive, and add new members along the way. This would not be the case if "Michelle" had shared a folder served from her personal school Google Drive.

As you can see, my colleagues and I use Team Drives for a lot of event planning. They are a wonderful addition to your toolbox should you decide to use them!