Chris Hamady

Acknowledging the fact that current trends are moving in the direction of reducing or eliminating printing entirely, our primary teachers have asked for an easy way to mass print student Google Docs projects so that those examples of technology literacy can be taken home and shown to their student's guardians. After thinking about this and corresponding with NWOCA's John Mansel-Pleydell ( http://twitter.com/theohiobloke ) , there are a couple of solutions here. The first is detailed in Alice Keeler's excellent post entitled,  PDF my Google Drive Folder. You can find that post here:

http://alicekeeler.com/2015/08/16/pdf-my-google-drive-folder/

This procedure esentially converts a folder of Google Docs to a collection of PDFs that you can easily download and mass print to your computer using the procedure outlined at the end of this post.

We can remove a step in this workflow if we can show the students how they can convert their Google Docs to PDF, and then drag those PDFs to a teacher's shared folder (or turn in the PDF via Google Classroom).

Once a teacher has a collection of PDFs in a folder, they would download the folder of PDFs to their computer. On a Mac, they would then open the folder of PDFs and select all (command+a). They would then drag the PDFs to the print queue icon located in their doc. At this point, all of the documents would print automatically without having to open up each file individually.

The steps required to add a print queue icon to your Mac dock can be found here:

http://www.cranstonit.com/blog/files/printing-from-your-dock.php

Once that has been completed, any PDF, word processing, or text editing documents that you drag onto the printer icon will immediately print.

CH