Staff accessing pupil home folders - cloud migration

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Hello,

 

How are people managing computing staff accessing pupil home folders to retrieve work?

 

At the moment we have a on premise file server that staff can dip into pupil home folders when needed. We are looking to move across to OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint at the summer and wondering what solutions I can give staff to get around this legacy way of doing things?

 

Thanks

Joel

[Boredguy]

None of our teaching staff have access to student areas, however as all the user files are in OneDrive, students can share an entire folder with a member of staff if they need to show their work, and of course with their own class Teams we've shown staff how then can configure folders so only specific students can access a folder for NEA work so the teacher can see the documents, the student can see the document, but their class mates can't.

[lmrogers]

None of our teaching staff have access to student areas, however as all the user files are in OneDrive, students can share an entire folder with a member of staff if they need to show their work, and of course with their own class Teams we've shown staff how then can configure folders so only specific students can access a folder for NEA work so the teacher can see the documents, the student can see the document, but their class mates can't.

I can't say I've looked that hard at this but how do they configure the folder for the NEA work?

[KevinB]

Pretty much the same here as @Boredguy says. When staff moaned a bit about accessing students' folders we talked to them about privacy and pointed out that if students were using an exercise book and hadn't turned it in on time, staff wouldn't expect to go to the student's home and rummage around in their bedroom for it.

 

Once we showed them how students could share a particular folder to them the staff were happy enough with that.

[Boredguy]

This is what we have been doing in Teams.

 

Within File View, Staff create a NEA folder and within it a folder for each student.

We then click the Open in SharePoint link from the NEA folder.

 

That gives us a view of all the Student named folders. By each folder the "more info" ... icon that gives you the option to Manage Access.

Remove the Members and Visitors rights (should be bottom of the list) and click the + by Direct Access and enter the student account you want to access that folder. I untick the notify box and thats it.

 

Students then click in the NEA folder in Teams and just see their 1 folder.. Staff see all of them

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Thanks guys for your input. Getting lots of blow back from staff saying that not being able to jump into kids folders will cause them an incredible amount of delays and they won't be able to do their jobs! We may end up having to keep pupil data on-premise.

[Boredguy]

Thanks guys for your input. Getting lots of blow back from staff saying that not being able to jump into kids folders will cause them an incredible amount of delays and they won't be able to do their jobs! We may end up having to keep pupil data on-premise.

 

Would be interesting to see what your student Acceptable User Agreement has regarding staff accessing their files, and if there is anything in the staff handbook, since ours specifically states that only the IT Support team have that permissions across all the schools in the trust.

[ThatBoringBloke]

We use Google Classroom. Students can save what they want to their own Drive, but any work that needs to be submitted or seen by staff goes into the Classroom. Pretty simple really, and seems to work for the majority of staff.

[RobFuller]

We have a Microsoft PowerApp that staff use to "jump" into Student OneDrive's, works well.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We have a Microsoft PowerApp that staff use to "jump" into Student OneDrive's, works well.

 

Is this difficult to setup? Hadn't thought about this.

[RobFuller]

Is this difficult to setup? Hadn't thought about this.

 

I had some help but in the end wasn't as difficult as we expected.

[Primus]

I had some help but in the end wasn't as difficult as we expected.

 

Are there any instructions for it?

[RobFuller]

No step by step, if I can find some time I can probably put together something high level

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Would be really interested in this PowerApp - would you be able to point us in the right direction?

[RobFuller]

Sorry been manic, trying to document it a bit better to share!

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Thank you any help you could offer would be gratefully received - under pressure to come up with a solution for September!

[free780]

You can script adding teachers as admins of each OneDrive. Depends if they just need read access and they have to change the URL.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

I suppose this would work - at the moment they have read/write to the file server but only use the access to get copies of work for marking if students haven’t submitted it. Do you happen to have a copy of this script?

 

We are going to push the “should you really be doing this” - pupils taking ownership of their own learning, teams assignments etc but there are some long standing members of staff that are insisting they need an easy way to get into kids documents or else their workload will become too high!

 

Thanks in advance for everyone’s responses.

[mikes]

We haven't gone fully cloud - the majority of our staff just use Google Classroom and so the kids submit work as attachments on the homework section and the staff recieve work that way. Only our IT dept really use the ability to go into student home folders and even then they barely use it. When I started here in 2008 staff had no access to student work, in 2012 or so I added a drive mapping for them but I think the vast majority of our staff have no idea what the drive map does, and before Google Classroom in 2020 was introduced, I'd often get a frantic phone call from a teacher "So and so student is off ill, and I need some work from their user area, can you get it for me!" being totally unaware they could just go into drive X:\ and get it themselves. But I think the YoE 17 YoE 18 etc structure was too confusing for them.

 

Anyway are you planning on going fully cloud or could you just ease them into it? 5 years ago moving to the cloud / Google etc would have been unthinkable for us. Now it is what the majority of departments use and only IT and DT really use our on prem student fileserver any more.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Hello,

 

Thank you for the advice - I think similar to yourselves the majority of the staff will never even use the home folder access - it will simply be the IT faculty that use this. We are having to completely rebuild the network this summer as we join the MAT infrastructure which is heavily focused on Teams/OneDrive and SharePoint. The school also has a digital strategy lead that is pushing the Office 365 as a solution for everything - they are giving Surfaces as a 1-1 for 6th formers. We are also moving to cloud MIS and finance systems in the summer. The majority of the staff are already using Teams assignments in one way or another.

 

I think the best solution to appease the IT staff would be either a powerapp or script that gives them access to the kids folders when they need them. It seems daft to continue running a file server just for this purpose.

 

Thanks

Joel