Help teacher make online class

T

thomaspuzio

New Member
Hello,

I just signed up and couldn't find anything directly related to my topic so here goes.

I teach Microsoft Office at a high school. My school does not use their network properly, no individual user accounts and all machines are logged into locally, so when my students complete work, their documents are stored on the local hard drives. This means when it comes time to grade I have to log into each machine!

My previous school used shared folders on the school's server so I could have students place their work in a "drop box" and I could place instructions and samples in the "shared" folder. When it came time to grade, I would open the network folder for each class and all the documents students turned in would be there waiting.

Since I can't get the network setup the way it should (not my job and would require an overhaul of the entire system, creating user accounts for 1700 students etc.) Ithought I would attempt to create a web-based version of what I had previously.

I want a web site students can go to to upload their finished work into an online "drop box." Then they could download the samples and instructions from the online "shared" folder. That's all I need. The page could be totally blank with a simple title and two folders, one for the drop box and one for the shared folder.

I don't want to pay for web hosting if I don't have to, and I don't care about a long URL. I just want to make it easy to grade work so all student work is in the same spot.

Student complete work in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, files are usually no bigger than a few 100k (except in the case of ppt, might be up to 2mb). The total amount of data I would need to store would probably be a few hundred MB max at any given time.

What are your thoughts on this idea?
 
Wouldnt it be easyer to set up a email address for the students, with yahoo you get like 1gb free storage, and in the inbox you can make folders and directories, just open that and get them to email their work?

I think the problem with a web based page will be the security and if not properly set up it could get unwanted vistors, also you will probably have to pay for the webspace too.
 
email, yes and no

I suppose I could have students email me but here are my concerns with that solution:
1. I have over 120 students, and it would be rather tedious to open individual emails with individual attachments for that many students. Consider each student completes about 150 assignments per school year, so that's a lot of clicking on my part.

2. Students would need to have access to an email account to SEND the email in the first place. Most of these kids don't have that AND, my school blocks most free email account services that I've tried. If they didn't have one I'd have to set up accounts with all those users (they aren't very computer saavy)

3. Email doesn't solve the problem of having a "shared folder." I want students to have easy access to PDF's that contain instructions and sample work. They need to use these daily and open/close them regularly. I use a network monitoring software called HiClass to transfer these files to local hard drives, but in order for that transfer to work i have to log in each machine. PLUS that only works in the one class room that has that program installed, i teach in another class that doesn't have any such program so I have to manually save files to the hard drives of 30 computers with a flash drive
 
Sounds to me like you have one screwed up school and some things need to change. I think the best solution even though it would take a while would be to set up AD for the computers and set up a network and have shared folders. It will take work but if you are not willing to have them email you the assignemnts which isnt that much work then its probably best to have the AD setup and each one has user accounts... Or you can share a drive on your hdd and have them all map to is as i assume all the computers are on a network that woudlnt be that bad.
 
network admin sucks

I approached my network admin in the beginning of the year about setting up the network for individual user accounts etc., but he doesn't know how to do that. He's not really a computer expert so much as the only person that could troubleshoot computers. His main job is as a student programmer (not computer language programmer, but a class schedule programmer). So he's pretty much occupied dealing with grades, class balace, student programs, etc.

All the stations have deep freeze installed, but they do use the "thawspace" partician (only 60mb) and that's where i've been saving stuff.

I'm not too familiar with setting up network stuff simply because at my last school my network admin was a total genius and made everything for me. I just taught my classes, managed those few network folders, and did a little account management (pw changes etc.).

I like the idea of mapping the shared volume, but here's my questions...

1. The stations (including my teacher station) are logged in to the local machine, don't they have to be logged into the same network server as the shared volume to work?

2. Do I have to log in with the admin account for the shared volume to be available for others? Or can it set up sharing as admin and then just log in as "student" on the teacher machine?
 
Why not just create a public FTP so that people can basically type in the adress to the FTP within their browsers, then simply drag and drop to and from the FTP with ease? Although this will of course require an FTP server / service of some kind. Which isn't at all hard to get established if you have a spare computer you don't mind leaving switched on and connected to the internet at all times. It wouldn't cost you a penny either, if you ran the FTP from a cheap low end workstation from home. I used to do it for my college mates and I.
 
Good thing is you would be able to set the FTP to use port 80, which means that the college/school wouldn't be able to block it as that's the same port as HTTP uses, so unless they want to ban the entire net access, it'll always be open. Also, you could create a simple free DNS (with no-ip.com for example, thats who I used in the past) and have a URL created to connect to the FTP IP so that you don't have to give out the IP blaitently. Plus you can access it from any workstation with the Internet without needing to install anything. Hence the ease of use comment, worked a treat for myself and my college mates. Although obviously the task lays in setting the FTP up, which could be a little bit of a tedious task if you've never done one before.
 
ok, that sounds doable but I have a few questions:
1. Does the computer always have to be logged on?
2. What the heck did you just say? I mean, I have heard of FTP, DNS, URL, IP, etc., but i've never done what it is you're suggesting so i'm not sure how I would go about setting up a public FTP server.
3. How "good" does the computer have to be to function properly as a public FTP server? I don't have an extra computer lying around, but I might be able to repurpose an old one from school.
4. What about firewalls? My home coputer uses windows firewall, would the server not have a firewall?

Sorry i'm such an idiot when it comes to this stuff
 
Firstly, don't apologise, we all start at some point and we all had to learn one way or another. The only way to learn after all is to ask.

As for your questions, the computer doesn't have to be that good a spec at all, in fact, it can be done on quite an old computer (Even a Pentium 2 would suffice, and they're easily around 7/8 years old 'Giving you an idea of how low a spec the computer can be').

Do you own a router? As if so then the Windows Firewall will be more then sufficient. You could even go without running a firewall on it as routers are usually more than capable of diverting any attacks etc. With a little added common sense too of course. However you would need to look into FTP server software which you install once on the FTP machine alone, not on the client / external computers you would access it from. I recommend Bulletproof FTP. Great program.

Basically you would do the following: Setup the workstation, install the FTP software, get the FTP up and running, create a DNS. Although the DNS isn't a required feature, it's just a nice little addition so that you don't have to blaitently give out your IP.

All it means is that, to access an FTP server you type the IP address to that server. For example: 195.757.443.234:80, however instead of giving out the IP as the server address, you can assign it a free DNS address, so in turn you can access the FTP by simply typing in the free DNS address, e.g. www.myclassftp.freedns.com

I hope that clears up any confusion for you.
 
Yes I own a router: http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Sate..._C2&cid=1144763513404&childpagename=US/Layout

i have an old laptop that would do the trick here.This computer has windows 98se installed on it. It only has 128MB of ram, but it has a 20GB hdd. I might need to purchase a new PCMCIA network card, because it uses that old connection with the fragile plastic connector and I bent it. It's a P3 (I think). I might be able to get a cheap system put together with spare parts from school if I need something better than this.

How does this work in real life? Are there any examples you know of I could take a look at?

Can I set read/write priviledges on folders so students can only "drop" files in the drop box? What about see contents but not open anything (so they can verify they turned in their work)?
 
Yes you can set the permissions so that you can allow dragging in only, and not removing or dragging out. Not entirely sure on the seeing the contents but not opening them, I haven't tried to do that myself. That laptop should be more than adequate, and as for an example, I don't know of one personally but below is a screenshot found on google of an FTP accessed using the browser IE:

ftp_ie_root.gif


As you can see it's like browsing around dragging and dropping within a normal folder on your computer, only it's online. Bare in mind though that the more people who sign in at the same time, the more of a strain it'll be on the system. Good spec computers are usually used for a large member count FTP. So for your student count, if all accessing at the same time then the laptop, in my opinion, wouldn't cope. However no more than 10 at a time should be sufficient. Plus, don't forget to note that the larger the files downloaded / uploaded to and from the FTP, the more bandwidth will be used, meaning your home internet connection would be constantly in use and possibly maxed out if loads of students were using it at the same time.
 
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Hi,
I think that the ideal piece of software for what you are after would be moodle, from http://moodle.org/
It allows you to set work online, and students can upload their work. All you need is a web host/server with PHP & MySQL support, the school that I go to uses it and it is pretty good, and I think you would benefit from it because from what I have seen it allows students to upload work, then you, as a teacher, can mark it and give them feedback online. It is all managed through a web-based interface so once it's setup you can tell your students to create accounts (should take no more than 5 minutes at the beginning of a lesson) then they are able to upload their work for you to see.
 
interesting

As far as the bandwidth issue... That might be a problem, I have cable internet from Comcast @ 6mb/s. I doubt more than 10 would be using it simultaneously, although if they all finished their assignments at the same time they might (but it would only be one class at a time so a max of 28 students).

There wouldn't be much load during non-school hours since all work must be done in class.

The moodle thing looks interesting, but confusing at the same time.
 
I know that my school does networks them all together, but I don't know how they did it.

My teacher grades them in class, he has each student pull up the assignment and he goes around and grades them.

You could either do that or have them print the assignments out.
 
why your suggestion doesn't work

This is my 8th year doing this and so through my experience I have learned that your suggestion to have students open up their assignments in class and grade them at that time does not work. Here's why:

1. It takes the entire period to grade one assignment per student let alone three or four, which is often what needs to be done in my class. Students have up to 150 assignments per year in my class so volume becomes an issue

2. Students are impatient and will start yelling, "COME GRADE MINE NOW!" Of course this can be dealt with, but the real problem is grading like this puts the student in charge of pacing since I'm dependent upon them to open their stuff and whatnot.

3. What do the others do while they're waiting? Of course I could assign something, but generally speaking if I'm completely focused on grading students will just sit there and talk or play on the internet rather than work. They know I don't have the time to spend keeping them on task since I have to grade.

4. I have to grade in class, so if I want to grade in the morning before school (which is when I do most of my grading) I still have to log in to each machine and open the files from the student folders myself.

5. A huge amount of class time will be wasted because I will be grading. Basically a grading day is a wasted day where students do nothing.

As for your other suggestion, to print out the assignments, there are some obvious problems with that:

1. 100 assignments (minimum 1 page each, powerpoint can be up to 8 pages each) X 120 students = 12,000 sheets of paper MINIMUM. This does not include the accidental printing that happens, such as a student hitting print and not seeing their paper immediately come out the printer so they go hit print again and again until their first print job comes out. This is such a HUGE waste of paper for no reason. Don't forget the toner, which is more expensive than the paper, and include the wear and tear on the printer as well. This is a costly solution and I work at a school with very little money.

2. AND THIS IS THE BIG PROBLEM WITH PRINTING... When I have students complete an assignment I need to see HOW they made it, not that it just looks the same. If you're making a word document with headers and footers, tables, different alignments, columns, etc., it is easy to make a paper "look" like it's supposed to without actually doing it correctly. Think about trying to center a title on a page. A kid will most likely use the space bar or perhaps the tab key to perform this task when he should use the center alignment button. Without looking at the actual file there is no way to tell if the task was performed correctly.
 
Well as long as the files that the students are uploading aren't out of this world huge in size (Mb), that connection should be fine, if considering the FTP method that is.
 
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