A Simple Google Drive Hack for Interactive Group Work

My class in human centred design has workshop presentations to do over the next few weeks and so we have to invent so remote analogs to things we would with workshop participants sitting around a table. Here’s one.

Create a Google Doc that is shared for editing with your participants (or whoever has the link).

Create a Google Drawing for each participant. To make it easy to keep track, name the drawing for the participant and put a text box in the drawing with their name.

Publish each drawing. Then, in the Google doc, insert each drawing from your drive on the page, resizing as needed. Adjacent to each drawing insert text such as “Edit drawing” or “Amir’s Drawing.”

Go back to each drawing and click on the Share button. Get the sharing URL for allowing editing. In the Google doc, use this URL to make an “Edit Drawing” link.

The document looks like this (it’s live – go ahead and click the link and edit the drawing):

Participants click on their link and they can modify the drawing. In the Google doc, an “Update” button will pop up when changes are saved in a drawing. Thus, the Google doc displays work of team.

I can go one step further and publish the google doc and get it embed code which I then put on a Canvas page

Author: Dan Ryan

I'm currently an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com. I've been a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. I'm driven by the desire to figure out how to teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily.

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