Star Documents in Your Google Drive

Is your Google Drive a mess? Now that we have students doing digital work it gets extra muddy as our Google Drive also is full of student work with the same titles as our original documents.

Star Anything You Will Come Back To

One simple way to find things in Google Drive is to star anything that is worth looking at again. Will you use this next year? Star it.

In the Document

I have a tendency to use docs.google.com/create or slides.google.com/create to make Google Apps documents easily. But the problem is they create in My Drive in Google Drive rather than in a folder. While editing the document, notice the star icon next to the document title. Click on it to star the document.

In Google Drive

In Google Drive, single click on the files that are important. TIP: You can select more than one document at a time by holding down the Control key. (Use the Command key on a Mac). Right click on the document and choose “Add star.”

Keyboard Shortcut

If you’re like me, you try to avoid using the mouse. I like to use keyboard shortcuts. This one is easy, just press S for star!! So while you’re chilling on the couch watching TV, open your Google Drive and use the arrow key to go down the list of documents and press S for anything that is important enough to want to use or look at again.  

Starred in Google Drive

In Google Drive, you can find “Starred” on the left-hand side. This shows you a list of all your documents you starred. To be honest, I never use this. I have too much starred stuff to make this filter useful. You can also sort it by “last modified” to make it more useful.

Filter for Starred

In the search box at the top of Drive notice the tiny triangle. Click on it. This brings down a menu of ways to filter your Google Drive. Click on the “Starred” checkbox and then choose any other criteria you have for locating your file. POOF all the student documents go away!

is:starred

Notice when you filter Google Drive for starred files the search box at the top indicates is:starred. I have memorized this, and just type is colon starred in the search box to filter Drive.

Google Classroom

When students turn in work to Google Classroom, you become the owner. This means that when you are looking in Google Drive for files to add to an assignment, the student work can be getting in your way. When adding files to a Google Classroom assignment, type in is:starred into the search box along with your keyword. This removes all student work as file suggestions to add to your assignment. Of course, you need to have starred all your good stuff for this trick to work!