Tips and Shortcuts for Teachers to Save Time Using Google Drive

3 short, quick, and easy tech tips and tricks designed for teachers looking for Google Drive shortcuts

Hi everyone, and welcome to EdTech Classroom. Today we are going to learn tips and shortcuts for teachers to save time with Google Drive. I’ll be sharing three different and easy shortcuts.

1. How to create a new document

This is a really quick and easy way to create a new Google doc. Open up your preferred Internet browser (i.e. Google Chrome), and type in “docs.new” into the address bar. Once you press enter, a new Google doc will create, right into your Google Drive! It’s that simple.

You can also use this shortcut for Google Slides, Sheets, and Forms.

2. How to force students to “make a copy”

Let’s say that you have a Google Doc that you want to share with your students, but you want to force them to make a copy of this document. For example, let’s say you have a file that you want students to fill out. If you were to share this document with your students normally, you might have 20 or so students working on the same file at once. Instead, you can force each user to make a copy to add to their own Google Drive.

3. How to do an advanced search of your Google Drive

The Google Drive search bar feature works pretty well for the most part, but let’s say you’re looking for a very specific file that you’re having trouble locating. For example, when I type in “design thinking” into my Google Drive search bar, I have almost 100 files that pop up, which isn’t that helpful. If you click the down arrow, however, you can do an advanced search.

When I refine my search, by typing in “item name” and “has the words” keywords, my results are narrowed to only 4 results.

Thank you so much for reading this blog post, and I hope you found these Google Drive tips and tricks to be helpful!