Naming versions of Google Docs to keep track of drafts

One powerful thing about using Google Docs for teaching the writing process is the ability to see the revision history of any document. As students make changes, add and delete content, and respond to feedback from teachers and peers, they can return to previous versions of the document. Here's an older post that talks more about that (note that Google has changed "revision history" to "version history" but the rest remains the same).

A more recent feature of Version History is the ability to name specific versions of a document. This doesn't stop all the changes from being tracked; it just allows you to return to one or more specific, important past versions. You might name one "Rough draft", "Revised draft after peer edits", "Revised draft after teacher edits" and then "Final draft". Either the student or the teacher can do this and see the named versions.

Here's how it works:

This is a helpful way for both teacher and student to be able to see improvements over time.

Copying or Printing Google Docs with Comments

If you are using Google Docs with students to give teacher feedback, or as part of a peer-editing process, there are times you will want to either be able to copy or print the doc with all the comments intact. This used to be a headache but it's easier now.

First, Google has recently added the ability to simply copy comments when making a copy of the document. You can choose to share or not with the original collaborators or with others. Here's a short video showing how:

The work-around for printing Google Docs with comments is still to download the document as a Microsoft Word document and print from Word. Although there are a few Chrome extensions that  offer to print Google Docs with comments, I haven't found them reliable. Here's how to to download a Google Doc as a Word file:

Adding, organizing and sharing files in Google Drive

When you create or share Google docs from Google Drive, the organization is easy, but what if you want to add files of a different sort, or quickly organize and share files and folders? Here's a very short video that shows several ways to do that: