The Magic of Doctopus: A quick and easy way to deliver pre-named, pre-shared Google documents directly to your students’ Google drive

Cloud-based applications, such as Google Docs, enable authors to collaboratively write and edit documents, spreadsheets, and other products.  Such collaborations can provide powerful learning opportunities for students.  Typically, sharing a Google Doc with each student in your class would require you to copy sufficient numbers of the template document, then manually share each separate copy with each student.  Doctopus is a Google spreadsheet script that automates the document distribution process, allowing you to designate a template document, name each copied document uniquely (with the student’s name and assignment title, for example), and determine the folder in which the documents will be housed in your own Google drive.  The specific sharing settings are set up in advance, so that each document can be automatically shared with all of the teaching assistants or co-instructors, as well as the individual student.  There’s even a team feature that will allow you to share a team document with each member of every student team in your class.  Because the shared documents “belong” to the originator, control of the document remains on the instructor side of the screen, unless and until we hand that ownership over to the student.  So far, we’ve used Doctopus in three courses, one with an enrollment of more than 500 students.  It saves a lot of time and is now our favorite way to set up assignments such as metacognitive journals for individuals or an intellectual property notebook that will be shared by project teams.

云端应用程序，如谷歌文档，为作者提供了协同撰写和编辑文档、电子表格以及其他产品的便利。此类协作为学生提供了强大的学习机会。通常，将谷歌文档与班级中的每位学生共享，需要您复制足够的模板文档，然后手动将每个单独的副本分享给每位学生。Doctopus 是一款谷歌电子表格脚本，它自动化了文档分发流程，允许您指定模板文档，为每个复制的文档赋予独特的名称（例如，使用学生的姓名和作业标题），并确定文档将在您个人谷歌驱动器中的哪个文件夹中存放。具体的共享设置是预先设定的，以便每个文档可以自动与所有助教或共同授课教师以及每位学生共享。甚至还有一个团队功能，允许您与班级中每个学生团队的所有成员共享团队文档。由于共享文档“属于”原始创建者，因此文档的控制权始终掌握在教师一方，除非我们将所有权转让给学生。迄今为止，我们在三门课程中使用了 Doctopus，其中一门课程的注册学生人数超过 500 人。它节省了大量时间，并已成为我们设置诸如元认知日志等个人作业或将被项目团队共享的知识产权笔记本的首选方式。