[Andee Rubin]

I’m creating some shared datasets for use in a classroom and wondered about two things:

When I open a shared link, the document is called Untitled Document.  Is there any way to change that?

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.)   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?)

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?

[Dan Damelin]

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.

[Andee Rubin]

Thanks for that information, Dan.  Two follow-up questions:

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 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?

[Dan Damelin]

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.

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