Ok, so I spend a lot of time when I hear of products on the market that do simple services and think “how can Google do that?”. One of most recent items has been companies marketing their “wireless board meeting” software. Board meetings are more than just a simple agenda, superintendents and their board secretary spend considerable amount of time preparing exhibits to go with many of the agenda items. Small districts, like Andrew, have board packets that consist of at least 30 pages every month. Other districts that are considerably larger may range from 70-100 pages of meeting information. Often times it just depends on what the agenda items consist of and the amount of items for the meeting.
Rather than spend money on an online service for going wireless in board meetings, we simply use Google Drive instead. I have been planning this since before Christmas but just implemented it for the first time in January. Here is what I did to pull it off.
The first step is to create a folder in your google drive and title it “Board of Education”. Once you have done that, simply change the sharing settings to “Anyone with the link”. You need to make sure you complete that setting because for each meeting you will create a sub folder. All of these sub folders will inherit the settings of the parent folder. This will save you some time and the mistake of not making the folder available for others.
My board secretary and I work on the agenda in a google doc. Normally this process starts shortly after the most recent board meeting ends. Once we finalize the agenda, my secretary drags it into the appropriate meeting folder. We then start placing PDF files of our exhibits into the folder to complete the packet. We make sure to name the files so they are easily accessible by board members. For example, we will title one document “Exhibit V - Bathroom Renovation Bids”. By being consistent in the naming, you will make it very easy for board members to access the documents.
Once the packet is complete, we share the folder directly to board members. This will give them an email notice of the packet, and make it available for them to easily access via the Google Drive app on their iPad. They can access the documents from any device, which is the beauty of doing it through Drive. We have iPads for our board so that’s how they access it. You can email the link of the folder to staff, media, and post on your website.
Is this the most innovative use of Drive? Nope. It is very practical though. Some of these services for purchase on wireless meetings can range from $500 to $1500 per year. To me, that’s an unneeded expense.
A few things to think about....
Closed session meetings - IF you use Drive for distribution of confidential documents, be extremely careful you do not share with the public!
Space - You have 5 GB of space in your Drive account for files you upload. I’m guessing you may want to consider an upgrade for a few dollars a month.
Access - Make sure that the appropriate people have editing access to your folder and everyone else simply has viewing access.
Ease in to it - Our board is getting both digital and paper packets for the next five months. After that, we will transition to digital packets only. During that time, we will have our student tech helpers provide them with assistance to help them get the feel of using Google Drive.
If you are at FETC next week, I’ll do a short demo of this in my “Walk the Talk” session. Not going to be there but want to learn more? Let me know and we can schedule a Google Hangout!
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