Staff access to student files

[Deanuk]

Afternoon all,

 

I have had quite a few requests for staff to have access to student home drives, staff have requested this so they can mark work and check on progress etc. I was wondering if there was a program or something that can do this and if anyone here had any good solutions for this?

 

Regards,

Dean

[dcwhitworth]

Can't you just share the top level folder, add some permissions, cascade them down without replacing earlier permissions and then give staff a shortcut to the share. If you can't change permissions so easily look at scripting and using CACLS.

[jthompson]

We do it just by giving them access to the top level share containing all of the student user areas. We've got two security groups set up just for staff access to student user areas: one for read-only access (the majority of cases) and one with modify access (used grudgingly if at all, and for limited periods of time only). I believe it's all carefully set up so as to prevent those with modify access from deleting/moving any of the top-level folders. If at all possible, avoid giving staff privileges to modify student files. It's an accident waiting to happen.

 

We have all those permissions set explicitly on each user area folder, rather than inheriting them from the top level folder. That requires some kind of bulk tool (e.g. NTFSFix) or scripting to do it.

[NewFormz]

We've also given staff read only access the students work areas using NTFS permissions and mapping a drive to the top level folder.. works well and makes it easy for staff to access work.

[forkies]

We do this through a top level share and read only (used to give the ICT teachers modify too but they accidentally moved half a year groups home folders into someone else’s and I then said they couldn’t be trusted)

[pcstru]

I have had quite a few requests for staff to have access to student home drives, staff have requested this so they can mark work and check on progress etc.

Can students not submit work to a shared area (surely less work than a teacher ploughing through 30 student shares trying to find which folder has the homework)? What do they mean, "mark work"? How old are the students? How good is the AUP agreement? Are there other paths TPTB are trying to get people to use - google classroom, show my homework etc?

 

Technically, it should be a matter of having suitable OU's, Groups and then setting permissions. Perhaps the requirement is getting mangled? "Mark" sounds like write access - which can be problematic (even if you can audit every write). In a primary that may not be an issue, in a secondary, it starts to be an issue and in a 6th form, even read access should be unnecessary.

 

As with all 'oversight', there is likely a need to do some kind of Risk Assessment and Privacy Impact Assessment that covers the access at some level (how good is that AUP).

 

Even with read access, a really paranoid geek (hi there!) might worry about : students storing code which teachers run and which potentially allows privilege escalation and/or compromise of the endpoint. That should just be a matter of everyone understanding the risk but sometimes that is ... tricky.

[Techdek85]

Google Classroom. Works a treat.

[Steven_Cleaver]

Same here just give staff top level access and map this as separate drive but also have handin drive for students work.

[Deanuk]

I was thinking of top level with NTFS permissions but wanted to make sure it was "uniform" with what everyone else does. Thanks.

[Meldrew]

We do this through a top level share and read only (used to give the ICT teachers modify too but they accidentally moved half a year groups home folders into someone else’s and I then said they couldn’t be trusted)

 

We had something similar - ICT teacher trashed students work and had to be restored from backup.

[bossman]

+1 Google classroom here!

 

We did have a web app which @webman wrote for us called "Student Work Viewer" which pulls in all the users from AD into year groups and presents it in a tabulated form which you can also put in a search for that student, still works to this day but we have stopped giving Staff access to it now as we use the above.

 

 

[mjk]

Another For Google Classroom. It's the perfect solution for this and you even get parental notifications so happy ofsted too.

[Steven_Cleaver]

We had something similar - ICT teacher trashed students work and had to be restored from backup.

 

We only allow read access . So no one is editing or modifying files.