Many teachers love the collaborative nature of documents in the Google Drive system, but have difficulties keeping what is shared with them organized.  I have some recommendations on how to handle that, and hope this will help you take advantage of all that collaborative documents make possible.

Note that if you are brand new to Google Drive, this post may be confusing.  I am assuming an understanding of how to share folders and the different kinds of access (edit, view, comment) one can give in Google Docs and other tools in Google Drive.  I finish this advice with a question of how to handle one approach to formative assignment, and welcome your thoughts.

Keeping Organized for Assessment

Here's how I recommend handling folders.  It's a little work at the first of the year, but is a huge help from then on.

The teacher creates a shared folder for each prep (English 1, English 2, etc.; not a good example if you teach chemistry, I know).  That folder is shared with all students taking the same course.  The students have viewing rights, so what's in the folder is information (such as the syllabus) and assignment instructions/templates.  It is not (I repeat, not) where students turn in their work.

The teacher next creates an unshared folder for each period.  In each period's folder, make shared folders for each student, who will have editing access.  The folder is named something like Anderson_Jane-Ms_Mendoza.  That means the name of the folder makes sense to both parties, and the folders in each period will be properly alphabetized in the teacher's folder for the period.  You can also have students create the folders, check they did the naming properly, and then drag them from "Shared with me" to the period folder you created.

When a student makes a copy of a file from a template (taken from the folder shared with the class), she or he names it according to the teacher's convention (see below for ideas), and then drags it into the folder shared individually with the teacher, who now has editing access to that assignment.  That's because the document takes on the sharing permissions of the folder to which the document is moved.

When assessing work, the teacher has two options.  First, if students have followed a naming convention for the file (Period 2 October Character Sketch - Anderson Jane for Ms Mendoza), then a search for the assignment (Period 2 October Character Sketch) should yield the files in proper order by period and then by name.  Note that the actual title of the assignment in the document ("Atticus Finch as the Honorable Father," etc.) can be different than the generic one used to name the file itself.  If a student does not name the file properly, it's like it was brought to class, but the student hid it in the corner of the room.  No credit.

The second assessment option is for the teacher to open the folder for the period on the left side of the Drive screen, and click on the folders for the individual students one at a time.  Assuming the teacher is prompt about getting to what the students turn in, and the contents of the folder are sorted by date-modified with the most recent ones first (the default in Drive), it should be the top item (or one of the top items).  The teacher does the assessment however he or she likes, closes the document, and then clicks on the next folder on the left in the Drive screen.  This approach also benefits from the naming convention to make it even easier to spot the file, but if a kid messes the name up a little bit, it's not as big a worry.  I'd also recommend that the teacher and individual students not make subfolders for the one shared between them, as that takes away some of the ability to quickly spot an assignment when doing the grading.  When finding an older assignment, simply use search in the folder.

Finally, a word on formative assessment.  While one can use comments to identify items the teacher wants the student to work with, anything that the teacher wants to see later (so as to compare what the teacher wrote with what the student actually did) should be part of the document itself, perhaps as a conversation that happens at the end.  That makes it possible to recover such things via Revision History, which doesn't happen with comments that the teacher or the students resolves.

Not having tried it, I'm not clear what happens when an assignment is a group one (i.e., multiple students are sharing with the teacher).  Those may need to be shared outside of the folders, and the teacher drags them from Shared With Me to an unshared folder for that assignment.

There are free (Flubaroo) and paid systems (like Teacher Dashboard from Hapara) which can simplify all of the above and also provide other tools for managing and tracking work.

In Part 2 of this post, I'll look at turning in work via a Google Form.