As a teacher, I’m constantly looking for ways to make my life easier. The computer is but a tool to use, and it can be used to do many menial tasks that we often end up doing manually or doing ourselves. Because of this, I’m a huge proponent of the saying “Work smarter, not harder”. We can free up additional time and systems by simply handing these over to the computer to do.
One of the great things that Google Suite has is the ability for students to share their work with the teacher. At first I was hesitant to hand out my teacher’s email address, but since doing so, I have students sharing their latest work with me almost automatically, and providing feedback in this way is really valuable. Further to this is their ability to collaborate together, and this year I am wanting to utilise the function of shared folders more.
To do this, I wish for students to put any file or creation into a shared folder. This then becomes easier to keep track of all of their work. The main problem with doing this of course is that you never know when a student has added a file to the folder or not, meaning you have to keep visiting the folder and checking it yourself.
Welcome to Zapier.
With Zapier, I can set it up so that when a file is added to a particular folder (i.e. classroom Shared folder) it will email a notification to me.
With Zapier you can set up automate processes between different services.
One of those is between Google Drive and Gmail.
Simply connect up your accounts, then select which folder you want to “watch” and which email you’d like to be notified.
Then, whenever that folder gets a file added to it, you will receive an email. Share this folder with your class and wait for students to start dropping their files into it.
Done!