Distributing Files With Facebook and Google Drive

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts about how I was using a Facebook page to keep students and parents informed of important things happening in the classroom. You can find that series through these links; part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. This morning I read about a service that would allow you to share large files on your Facebook page. I was just about to use it when I remembered that I could accomplish the same thing by using Google Drive and posting a link from files in my Google Drive account on my Facebook page.

You can upload videos, audio files, PDFs, Word documents, and just about any other file to your Google Drive account and you can make access to the file public if you want to. This is how I occasionally share some of my large PDFs. Grab the link to the file by clicking the share button in your Google Drive account then select "anyone with the link" as your accessibility setting. Now you can paste that link into your Facebook page for your class or your school.

Applications for Education
As I wrote a few years ago and still say today when people ask, I think that having a Facebook page for your class that students and their parents can Like is a good way to increase the distribution of information about your class. Students and parents need to be reminded to visit classroom websites, but very few students today need to be reminded to visit Facebook. Try this out by putting a helpful file like a course syllabus on your the Facebook page for your class.