
When I open a shared link, the document is called Untitled Document. Is there any way to change that?
That was a bug that has been fixed. If you make a new shared document now it will have the same title as the original doc that has sharing enabled.
When I open a shared link, the resulting document does not have sharing enabled. (Correct? That would just be if I wanted to change the document and shared the updated version.)
When you open a shared link is it like opening a new document or one of the built in example docs. So, yes, sharing is not enabled. The user always has to explicitly turn on sharing for a document. Once that is done and the document is saved, the document they are working on will have sharing enabled.
Is there any way to tell when one opens a link whether that document is a shared copy or not? (If I can see the link and it has “shared” in it, I know it’s a shared copy – but if I can’t see the link, is there a way to know?)
The only way clicking on a link would NOT open a shared document is if they had a link to the original document saved on Google Drive. In that case they would be asked to log into Google Drive to open it, and they would only be able to open it if they have access to it. You are correct that if you can see the URL, then it will have “shared” in it somewhere.
And just to be sure – once students have a shared link, they can just save a copy to share with a teacher without making a new shared link, right?
If they open a share link and modify that document, they will need to enable sharing and use the link to their shared document if they want to share back the changes. This all assumes they are not using Google Classroom to assign and work on documents. Here’s a video we plan to post soon on this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uhpm7SuBLtBBFK90B55J5PM0HQArxEF2/view?usp=sharing
There is also a new help page coming soon with info about sharing in a classroom setting using Google Classroom and the technique you have been using/describing above which works with any system for sharing links.