Using Google Team Drives to Create and Share Lesson Plans

With Google's release of Team Drives this last year, the process of creating and sharing lesson plans suddenly got a whole lot easier.

With a Team Drive, teachers don't have to wonder if they've shared their lesson plan folder with the right administrators or if the view/edit permissions are set correctly: everyone who has access to the Team Drive can see and provide feedback on their plans.

And to further improve the lesson planning workflow, you can submit a Docs lesson plan template for your organization to use. This helps teachers get to the work of lesson planning more quickly by starting with a pre-formatted document.

Below are the directions for how I set up several of the schools I support to use lesson plan templates in Team Drives. First we created a Team Drive, then we set up a reusable district lesson plan template. The final set of directions shows teachers how to use the template to quickly create new lesson plans.

(If you'd like my training resources, here's the step-by-step handout and video that shows teachers how to create lesson plans using their campus Team Drive.)

Creating a Team Drive

1. Go to your Google Drive and click on "Team Drives" on the left-hand side.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Click the "New" button in the top left-hand corner and name your Team Drive.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Select "+ Add Members" and enter the email addresses of the people you want to have access to the Team Drive.
   
   

   

You'll have to decide what you want your folder structure to look like in the Team Drive. We make folders by grade level, then create a folder for each teacher to create their lesson plan in.

Creating the Lesson Plan Template

1. Create a Google Doc with the lesson plan template for your campus.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Go to docs.google.com and click on "Template Gallery."
   
   
   
   
   
3. Select the name of your organization and click "Submit Template." Choose the Doc with your lesson plan template and click "Submit."
   
   

   

Depending on the settings for your district, you may have to wait for your template to be approved by your GSuite administrator. If there isn't an option to submit a template, you can talk to your GSuite Admin. If they're not familiar with templates, show them the screenshot below. The settings to allow custom templates are in the Admin Console under Apps > G Suite > Settings for Drive and Docs > Templates.

Creating a Lesson Plan from a Template

1. Go to your Team Drive and select the correct folder.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Click "New," then hover over the arrow next to Google Docs. Select "From a template."
   
   
   
   
   
3. Select the name of your district, then click on the correct lesson plan template.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Rename the template, then create your lesson plan. Since it's a Doc, everything saves automatically.