I've been thinking recently about file access for pupils when they work at home / school. As we never signed up to an "off the shelf" learning platform solution this has been an area that has always been something I know has needed sorting out.
At the moment we have several services that we buy into that host the work created by pupils online (The online tools in Purplemash from 2Simple, and Sherston's Channels to name just two), but nothing that offers access to all our pupils work 24/7.
We also use Google Apps for education for document creation, collaboration and sharing. Recently Google have introduced the ability to store ANY type of file in an apps account - even if Google Apps cannot read and use that file - which is a great addition. It means that we could (if we feel the need - and I do) get the children to save all work they currently put onto the school server in their own 'My Documents' into Google, and therefore give them 24/7 access to all their files. The ability to share folders / files only with other users on the porchester.net domain is a great bonus - children can create resources and share them with a group of pupils / their class / teacher as they need.
But now another solution has popped its head up and is waving frantically to grab my attention. Dropbox is a superb cloud based storage solution. I've been using it for a while now, and staff at school are starting to use it too. Soon we'll be able to plan lessons / topic, drop it into a dropbox shared folder and let other teachers see, access and load the work instantly on any computer, laptop or mobile device. And with staff starting to use it, it has now got me thinking whether it could be adapted for pupils use too.
There are many questions I need to address before we ever go ahead with something like this; security and safety of the pupils primarily, how non shared folders could be managed, preventing non school pupils access to the folders, and of course whether dropbox is accessible to our pupils. Staff can use it on the school network currently without issues, but pupil profiles and filtering levels may need to be amended before this could work.
I'll be pondering whether to go with Google or Dropbox for the pupils, along with discussions with the HT, but both services seem to offer us a FREE 24/7 file access solution. It would be another tool in our growing collection of services we use to provide pupils with access to learning beyond the school gates.
