Managing Mac Class Folders

To allow you to leave exercises or class materials for students to pick up, and to allow your students to drop off essays and exercises for you, the file server's Class Folders section is subdivided for each class, and further broken down to four different folders folders. Here is the main view of your class folder:

Your class folder will start out with an Admin folder, a Pickup folder, a Dropoff folder and a Share folder.

The Admin folder is intended as a place for you to store documents where your students have no access. The Share folder is a place where both you and your students have read and write access to all of the contents.

Inside the Dropoff folder should be a properly configured Sample Dropoff folder and a program for creating Dropoff folders called "New Dropoff Folder". The permissions of folders within the Dropoff folder are different from the folders within the Pickup folder. Students may open Pickup folders, list their contents, and copy files from them to their Desktop. Students can not copy files into a Pickup folder. Pickup folders are intended for instructors to distribute documents to their students.

Dropoff folders are intended for students to turn in documents to their instructor. Students can not list the contents of a Dropoff folder but they can copy files into a Dropoff folder.

Instead of manually having to modify the permissions of each new Dropoff folder you create, you can run the New Dropoff Folder program and it will prompt you to name your folder and configure the permissions automatically.

In the example below I have doubled clicked the New Dropoff Folder program and typed in exercise1 for the name of my new Dropoff folder.

There are now two Dropoff folders in my Class Folder, sample1 and exercise. An important note is that students can not copy a file directly into the main Dropoff folder. They must copy a file into either the sample1 Dropoff folder or any other Dropoff folder you create throughout the quarter.

When a student attempts to copy a file into a Dropoff folder, such as sample1, they will receive the warning displayed below. This message warns the students they will not be able to open the Dropoff folder to verify the document was successfully copied. This is the intended behavior. It is up to the instructor to verify that each student has copied their documents into the dropoff folder before the end of class. The student should click OK to continue and the file will be copied to the Dropoff folder.

Sometimes an instructor may want to setup a folder with permissions that are different than a Pickup or Dropoff folder. In order to accomplish this you must manually configure the permissions of the folder. To change the permissions of a folder you need to select it by clicking on it once and then from the File menu select Get Info. See the example below for the folder named Full Access.

Once you select the Get Info command the dialog window below will appear. To show the permission details in this window click on the triangle next to Ownership & Permissions and then once more on Details.

The following steps will allow you to create a folder that gives student full access, in other words student will be able to both delete and copy files in the folder. Change Read Only in the Others section to Read & Write and change Ready Only in the Group Access section to Read & Write.

After changing the permissions to Read & Write the window will look like the following. Once you are satisfied with your changes you can close this window and the changes will take affect.