5 New Schools, Districts Adopt 'Web Lockers'

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/10/08

Five school groups have signed on for School Web Lockers, a file sharing and storage provider. The new customers include the Roman Catholic Diocese Schools of Albany, NY; Clarkstown Central School District in New City, NY; De La Salle Institute in Chicago, IL; New Urban High School in Milwaukie, OR; and Pierson Vocational High School, in Nogales, AZ.

Through its software as a service (SaaS) platform, School Web Lockers provides each school or school district with a secure, password-protected Web site for file sharing and storage. Users--students, teachers, and staff--are given access to their own digital dropbox, or Web locker, which is available via password from the Web site. Users can create work on one computer and then stash files in their Web locker for completion later from the same or a different computer.

"Before School Web Lockers, our students and teachers had to save files to servers that they could not access from home. They were using flash drives and burning CDs to transport information to and from school," said Ellen Robertson, coordinator of instructional computing for Half Hollow Hills Central School District in Long Island, NY, which began using the service in 2007. "Now they just upload files to their Web lockers for easy anytime access--from any computer, at home or at school, or even on vacation. Although that is by far the best aspect of School Web Lockers, the pricing is also very competitive."

The service is priced at about a dollar per student per year, according to the company. Web Lockers said its files are backed up daily and preserved from year to year to allow students to create a portfolio of work. The service also offers built-in security and safety measures, such as blocked file types, parental sign-in and the ability for teachers and school administrators to monitor what students are storing. The company also provides teacher blogs and message boards for school-wide or district-wide online discussions.

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About the author: Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.

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