When it comes to managing my personal learning environment, Google certainly brings a lot to the table. Unfortunately, the most glaring oversight is Drive’s lack of ability to conveniently share links among collaborators. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of social bookmarking as much as the next person, but when I’m working with a group and the bulk of the material we are working on is stored in Drive, I would really love a way to share bookmarks with those project files.
Until a more elegant and connected solution appears, my solution is to share project-specific links via a Google Sheet.
- Collaborators share a Google form that allows them to input information for links they want to share within the group.
- Links that are submitted via the form are collected by a Google Spreadsheet.
- Collaborators now have a easy-to-access, centralized space to store and share URLs.
To take this example a little further, I imagined this solution incorporating a leaderboard and being used among students working together in a class.
- Each student is asked to share links on the topics they are reading about each week.
- They submit their URLs via a Google Form
- Other students can access the shared links from the spreadsheet (collecting results) in Drive.
- The leaderboard counts the number of submissions each student has made, giving each of them a quick visual of how much or how little they are contributing compared to their classmates, and automatically updates as new submissions are made (as in the examples linked below). Note that the pie chart is embedded and will update whenever a student submits a link:
If you’re curious what the form looks like, the link submission form is included below.. You can see the responses in the spreadsheet by following the leader board image links above. (Fictitious student names are pre-populated for the purpose of demonstrating this example).