Collaboration at LLI
LLI is a collaborative organization, with participating members working behind the scenes to coordinate LLI events, policies, programs, etc. Before we had Google Suite for Education (G Suite), there was so much emailing of files back and forth among participating members to do committee work. There could be many versions of a single document, each residing on a member’s hard drive. Getting the most current version was difficult, to say the least. Long-term archives could be stored on multiple computers.
Luckily, G Suite is designed to help this collaboration with a set of software tools available for free to anyone with a lli.bard.edu account (and any member can have an account).
Google Drive
One collaboration tool in G Suite is Google Drive is a place to store your files in the cloud. This makes files and folders accessible from any device in any location. All you do is log in to your LLI Google account and navigate to drive.google.com. LLI accounts have free unlimited storage. Here is the description from Google:
With Google Drive, you can store all your files in the cloud, including photos, Microsoft®Word® documents, Excel® spreadsheets, and more. You can also make changes to a Word file using Google Docs, or convert your Word files to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
You can open your files from your computer’s Drive folder on the desktop or from your browser. Files you create with Google Docs open in your browser or mobile app. Other files in your Drive folder will open in their regular applications (like Adobe® Reader® for PDF® files) on your computer.
My Drive and Team Drive
If you already have a Gmail account (such as [email protected]), you might be familiar with My Drive, the storage space in the cloud associated with your Gmail account. When you get your [email protected] account, you get a separate, independent My Drive. This is accessible when you log in to drive.google.com with your LLI account. In other words, you must log in to see My Drive and you might have more than one My Drive, depending on your number of Google account(s).
LLI members may also have access to Team Drive, where files are shared among LLI committee members. While your My Drive is private to you and whomever you choose to share files with, Team Drive contains files used for collaboration. For example, if you are a member of the Communications Committee, you will have access to all the folders and files on the Communications Team Drive. The Communications Committee uses Team Drive to share drafts of newsletter articles, images for the website, and all sorts of other things used by the committee.
Learn more about this at the G Suite Learning Center or on the LLI website at Membership>Participating Members>Using G Suite for LLI Members.
Get your G Suite Account
I am Deborah Schwartz, chair of the Administration/Infrastructure Committee at LLI. In this position, I coordinate the efforts of the LLI technology team, which includes the Communications, Registration, Technology, and Website subcommittees. I write these LLI Tech Corner columns to help our LLI members make better use of technology.
If you want your own LLI email address, please send me a message with your name and current email address at [email protected]. I will set you up. You will receive an email from Google (initiated by me responding to your request) and you must log in within 48 hours to set up your password and account. That’s it!
You must be logged in to post a comment.