Tech Tuesday - How to Transfer Google Files Easily to an Account Outside Your Workspace/School

What if you retire or get a new job and want to keep some of your Google files?  Google doesn't make it easy when you are in a workspace (like you are at your school), mostly for security issues, but it is possible and it is not too difficult.  It just takes some time.

My best friend is retiring and going to work in a private setting and ran into this difficulty.  She has lessons an activities that she worked hard on, but could not find an easy way to keep them.  There is the obvious download and then reupload to another account, but that could take a long time and sometimes things get lost in the formatting when you do that.

Here's the easy way -  

First: Create a backup Google account to transfer your files to.  For our directions, I'll call the original account "Teacher@gmail.com" and my new account "Backup@gmail.com".  Once that is done, I can move on.

Second: Create a new SHARED DRIVE.  You will see this option on the left hand side of your screen. I will call my new shared drive BACKUP DRIVE.  

Third: Click on BACKUP DRIVE and look in the upper mid-right part of your screen.  You will see MANAGE MEMBERS.  Type in your new account (backup@gmail.com).  Just to the right of that you will see that it is making backup@gmail.com a CONTENT MANAGER.  Change that to MANAGER. This is important.

Fourth: Move whatever files/folders you wish to keep into the shared drive named BACKUP DRIVE.  It will now make the shared drive the owner of these files.

Fifth: Open up the Google Drive for Backup@gmail.com.  Open the BACKUP DRIVE and you will see all the files and folders you moved there.  Now just drag them into your regular drive.  It will alert you that you (backup@gmail.com) are now the owner of these files.  

That's it!  Since you transferred ownership and didn't merely make copies, the actual files are gone from your original school drive and gone from your shared drive.  You now have complete ownership in your backup Google Drive.  Once you get your new school or workplace, you can move them over again.  The whole process doesn't take too long.

Tech Tuesday: Making a background image on multiple pages of a table in Google Docs - or - Use the Page Break!

 So I had this idea to make a chart for my students to fill out on how Heathcliff is a Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights.  I also wanted them to find two other Byronic heroes from sources of their own choosing.

I chose to use Google Docs for this mainly because my new school computer does not have Microsoft Word and I am too cheap to buy it.  I will throw in a plug for Open Office which is a decent free alternative.

Creating the table is no problem, but I wanted it to look fancy, so I imported in an image for the background of the first page.

Getting this image to fit here was not much of a problem either.  I set the image to be behind the text and I selected FIX POSITION ON PAGE in the edit box that appeared under it (though sometimes it appears above).

That was the easy part.  The problem I had came about when I tried to put an image as the background of the second page.  For some reason, every time I tried to move a new photo into the table, it would eventually jump to the top of the first page.  I tried:

1. changing where I was importing the image

2. deleting the table that continued onto the second page and creating a new table instead for the rows on the second page

3. creating the second page as a separate document and then copying and pasting it into the original document

All of these resulted in either the image jumping to the first page or disappearing altogether.

I did get it to work, though.

I was about to give up, but I tried one more thing.  I went back to each page being a separate table rather than just wrapping over to the next page.  Then, between the two, I selected INSERT then BREAK then PAGE BREAK.  This puts an automatic stop and will always make the next page its own page.  

An odd thing to make a blog entry over, but if you like to play around with the background images then maybe this will help you out in the future.