
When I first click on a shared link – before I open the document – it still says “Untitled document” – so if I’m trying to see what dataset I’m opening, I actually have to open it, rather than just clicking on the link for a preview. Any chance that can be changed?
I’m not sure we can fix this. The way the link works for opening a document in CODAP is to first open CODAP (with the default title of the webpage being “untitled document – CODAP”) and then passing in a key (the rest of the URL) which specifies what CODAP document to load after CODAP has been launched and loaded. So the preview link doesn’t know anything about what document will be loaded and can only show you the default web page title for CODAP before any doc is loaded.
I was confused about your answer to my last question: I thought that a student could just save a shared file to Google Drive (using Save) and the teacher could look at it – rather than having to create another shared file. Am I wrong about that?
So there’s sharing using CODAP share links, and sharing using Google Drive’s file sharing feature. We need to be clear about which sharing we are talking about. If you open a CODAP document that you did not author (via CODAP share link or one of the built-in examples) then you basically have a new copy of the document to play with and modify. This “new” document will not have CODAP sharing enabled and thus no share link to share with others (unless the user enables sharing).
However, if we are talking about Google Drive sharing privileges, then yes, once you share using Google Drive’s sharing then there is only one file, not a share link to a copy of the original. For this reason we generally discourage people from sharing original docs this way because there can be problems if more than one person opens the doc from Google Drive at the same time and both have Google Drive edit privileges. The most likely scenario is that whoever modified the file last will overwrite whatever the other person did. The worst case scenario when two people separately have the document open and are editing it is that the file gets corrupted.
So, to be safe, we generally suggest sharing via the CODAP sharing mechanism which always provides the person who clicked on the share link with their own copy. Using Google Classroom the Google Drive privileges are managed by the Classroom assignment mechanism. Once the student clicks “turn in” then they go from having edit to read only access to their doc, so there is no worry about two people having shared edit access to the same Google Drive file.