Sonoma State University

G Suite

SSU licenses Google's G Suite for document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation and management, and file storage and sharing. The G Suite consists of four main applications: Google Docs for document creation and editing, Google Sheets for spreadsheet creation and editing, Google Slides for presentation creation and editing, and Google Drive for file storage and sharing. Faculty can use the G Suite for their own instructional needs, and can recommend it to their students, as well.

Best Practices

  • Incorrect sharing settings on files and folders is one of the most common sources of frustration that faculty and students experience using Google Drive. If you want to share files with your students or have them collaboratively edit files, the easiest thing to do is share an entire Google Drive folder, rather than try to share each file individually. If you change the folder's sharing settings to allow General Access to Sonoma State University users, you can link directly to the folder in Canvas, and your students won't have any issues accessing it. You can find a guide to do that in Resources (below).
  • We do not recommend that faculty use Google Drive for collecting student assignments. If students share a Google Doc with you, they can continue to update it after the assignment deadline with you knowing. Additionally, if you aren't careful with how you receive and collect those files, you risk inadvertently sharing one student's work with another, which could violate FERPA. Instead, we recommend that you ask your students to submit copies of their work to a Canvas Assignment as a File Upload. Canvas Assignments automatically keep student work separate without any additional programming by you. This has the additional benefit of making it so that all classes are consistent with how they collect student work, reducing the cognitive load that students experience switching from class to class and submitting their work for each. You can find out how to use Canvas Assignments in Resources (below).
  • We encourage you to regularly clean out and back up your Google Drive using Google Takeout. That way, if there is ever a catastrophic data loss or SSU changes its file sharing solution (while you're on sabbatical and aren't reading email!), you'll still have copies of your most important files. You can find a guide to using Google Takeout in Resources (below).

Resources

Get Support

If your question isn’t answered by the above resources, we encourage you to visit CTET either in person or via Zoom, submit a help request, or just email us. We are happy to do a 1-on-1 training or support session with you. You can find our current business hours and contact information, including our Zoom link, on our Contact Us page.

You can also contact SSU's IT Help Desk for assistance using the G Suite.

Student Support

CTET only supports faculty, not students. If your students report any issues to you, we would encourage you to look at the issue with them and, once you've documented it, report it to us. Then we can figure out the cause of the problem.

If your students need direct support, they can contact SSU's IT Help desk for technology support, Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM.