Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking to teachers in the Rockingham, NC school district about Google apps. The school assigned a young lady (Jordan is her name) from the student council to be my assistant for the day. We were both in the room about an hour before my presentation was scheduled to begin. Jordan and I chatted a bit and I asked her if she was excited about her school’s 1:1 Chromebook program. Jordan likes that she will have a laptop but told me that she doesn’t want to have to type her notes because she prefers to be able to hand-write, highlight, and write in the margins of her paper. That was when I told her about the Google Drive app that she can use on her phone.

With Google Drive installed on an Android device students can take a picture of anything and instantly upload it to their Google Drive accounts. Once the image is uploaded it can be accessed from any Internet-connected device. Jordan was quite excited to discover that she can get the best of both worlds now. She can still write and highlight in her notebooks, but she can also back-up those physical notebooks and access them online when she needs to.

Another use of the Google Drive app that you might want to explore is capturing images of your students’ hand-written work like math equations. Upload those images to folders in your Google Drive account and you won’t have to carry those papers back and forth from school to home or worry about misplacing any student’s work. The Three Ring App can also be used for that purpose.