[K12OSN] file management

[Martin Woolley]

On Wednesday 08 Dec 2004 4:16 pm, Lee Myrick wrote:
> I was wondering how some of you deal with managing the movement of
> files that students want to work on at home--let's say  a lengthy essay
> that the student works on at school for a couple of weeks then wants to
> finish at home over the weekend.
>
> Do you have them email it to themselves? Or do some of you allow access
> to the server from outside?

We would like to allow access to their work from the outside but the Internet 
provision via the LEA does not allow this.  We've asked if we can put a box 
in their DMZ but they said this is too much of a security risk.  Also, they 
won't allow students to have email accounts.  We have a work around though.  
Students can either use one of the free email accounts (google, yahoo, 
hotmail etc) to move work.  We also run a wiki on an independent ISP and we 
encourage students to do their work on that, since they can access this at 
both home and school.  Doing this gets around document transportability 
problems.

The students mostly run M$ boxes at home and while OpenOffice can handle word 
and excel files (excluding strange fonts), a lot of the students have 
MS/Works (an oxymoron if ever there was one!) and these files cause us 
problems - we have no way of opening them.  We have posters all over the 
department saying that they must use a comon format for documents (html, 
ascii, rtf, etc) but they fail to do so.  We give away copies of the OpenCD 
(which contains an M$ port of OpenOffice) and we give away live eval Linux 
CDs all in a vain attempt to get the students to do their work in OpenOffice 
(which is what they use at school).

-- 
Regards
Martin Woolley
ICT Support
Handsworth Grammar School
Isis Astarte Diana Hecate Demeter Kali Inanna



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