Easy Binders for Google Workspace are a teacher-curated student work portfolio solution. Easy Binders simplifies the process of copying, making notes and saving student work to a centralized Shared Drive folder. The current date and teacher name are automatically appended to each file making it easy to see who added the item and when.
Who is it for?
Easy Binders are best suited for teachers in relatively small schools and are intended to help other teachers, even future teachers of the same student understand their strengths and challenges through the lens of their work. This can be especially useful when considering writing samples, presentations or even audio recordings in another language.
Possible use cases
Easy Binders can benefit Student Support Team cases by tracking examples of student progress over time. They can also be helpful for teachers who may want to explore some student work of students transitioning from Primary School to Middle School and Middle School to Upper School. Moreover, Easy Binders can be a great resource for Professional Development in looking at student work. Because the artifact is a copy, teachers and administrators can use the commenting function on documents to engage with the student work in meaningful ways.
Set-up and Overview
Easy Binders is free to try for your Google Workspace domain. Simply install the add-on and fill out the Google Form when prompted to start your 3-month trial. Once the trial expires, you will need to purchase a $200 yearly subscription to continue using Easy Binders. The subscription is good for your entire domain.
Below are the required OAuth Scopes for the Add-on to function:
Project OAuth Scopes
11 Scopes Requested
| View basic data about the Google Drive folders or files you select | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.addons.metadata.readonly |
| See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive |
| View and manage spreadsheets that this application has been installed in | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets.currentonly |
| See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets |
| View your country, language, and timezone | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.locale |
| See, edit, create, and delete only the specific Google Drive files you use with this app | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file |
| See your primary Google Account email address | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email |
| See your personal info, including any personal info you’ve made publicly available | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile |
| View and manage documents that this application has been installed in | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/documents.currentonly |
| See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Docs documents | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/documents |
| See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Slides presentations | https://www.googleapis.com/auth/presentations |
How the above scopes are used.
The application accesses a user’s Google Drive to create one Admin folder and one Google Sheet inside it: Student Data – (to manage the configuration and create the Easy Binders). The application needs access to the users Email address for licensing and role provisioning. The domain of the user is needed to grant access to all users from that domain to the application. No student work or student data is shared with me, the developer. The application stores the Document Id of the Config File in the script properties along with domain of the user to allow users to add their own students to the application. The application requires access to all Google Drive files, including documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in order to copy them to a Shared Drive and the ability to create Folders directly in a users Shared Drive. All teacher notes are copied to the metadata of the copied document, thus the app needs access to each file’s metadata to display the stored notes in the sidebar.