What is the best way to share electronic documents with people?
I'd be grateful for any suggestions, but for what it's worth, this was my train of thinking yesterday when I wanted to share a PowerPoint which I had created to support a lesson about the current rugby tournament.
1. I added it as an attachment to a message sent to the Yahoo mflresources group. This means that anyone who has signed up to the group and selected the option to receive individual mails gets it straight away into their mail box. It is very quick for the sender. The down side of this is that the audience is limited to the group (albeit a very large group of 4,000), an attachment can be very big, the mail can get lost amongst others and not all members subscribe to the individual mail service.
2 I considered adding it to my public 'Dropbox'. The down side is that I then have to take time to explain where to find the file within the folders .. there is no direct 'link' to the document. I am wary about joining shared dropboxes as there is a danger of filling up my own (and others') computer drive with docs and I am scared of deleting other people's work .. but I am happy to be corrected on this!
3. I could have added it to a website, but for complicated reasons, this is not a straightforward opertaion for me at the moment (using an old, unsupported program .. waiting to have time to learn Dreamweaver! I would also have to take time to decide how to categorise it
4. I could have added it to the mflresources pbwiki .. but every time I go there I forget how I have structured it, and I am not sure everyone can access it.
5. I googled 'Can I share a document via a blog' and came across a solution which I have now used. I uploaded the document to my GDrive, and made the setting 'anyone who has the link can view', and made the share 'view only' rather than edit. The down side is that it can take a while to upload (not long, but not as instant as attaching a doc to an email) and viewers have to have a gmail account. But here is the link if you want to see if it works!
6. To apply these sharing settings to a group of documents, I have set up a folder whose settings are 'anyone who has the link can view'. Here is a link to the group of docs I am setting up to remind me 'how to' do IT things. (It currently has two docs, including what to do if IE stops and how to share a folder and this doc)
Feel free to see if it works!
Here is a link to a copy and paste I did of this text.
Any further ideas welcome!
