“How can teachers harness all the awesomeness, ubiquitous access, and collaborative authoring power made possible by Google Docs without creating a document management nightmare?”

That is question Andrew Stillman posed, and then answered with his script, Doctopus. Doctopus allows teachers to auto-generate copies of template documents for individual students, small groups and whole classes.

The script plugs in to a course roster on a Google spreadsheet, which details each student’s name, information and Google email account. Enabling the script will walk you through how to set up this roster. Download the script from within any Google spreadsheet.