Cloud-based services like OneDrive are extremely important and learning to use them effectively is a skill that will serve our students (and teachers) well into the future. 

It’s worth taking a few minutes to get set up to use OneDrive Groups so that sharing and collaborating with your colleagues and students is quick and easy. It will also help those who are currently NOT using their school computer so that when they return to their usual device, all of their work will be synced and accessible. 

Each ISB student and teacher is given 5 TB (5,000 gigabytes!) of storage for free in OneDrive. There is very little chance that you will fill it all up. 

Step 1: Create folders to share content 

All of us already have shared folders in ES/MS/HS 365 for your classes, mostly for collaborating with your colleagues. You probably don’t have a dedicated folder for sharing documents with your students. If you don’t, you will want to set those up. Here are a couple of options: 

1. In your group/shared folder, create a folder called “Student Resources” (or similar) and then create folders for each of your units inside of that for organization; or
2. In each of your existing unit folders, create a folder called “Student Resources”. 

The idea is to try to put the content that you would like to share with your students in as few locations as possible. Once you’ve identified those locations, you can give students access to view anything that is placed inside of those folders and then easily share the contents. 

Step 2: Grant Access to students to view anything inside a folder 

It can get annoying to have to constantly change the sharing settings on a document and copy the correct link in order to share it with your students. You can fix this by giving view access to anybody at ISB for anything inside the Student Resource folders you just created. Once you move a document into that folder, you just need to send them the URL of the document in DX or any other application from the address bar and they can open/view the document. When you move it out of the folder, they can no longer access it. 

Find the folder that you want to share with your students, click the three dots and select “Manage access”. The easiest thing to do is to “Grant Access” to “Everyone except external users” to view the folder. This means that all students and teachers, if given a link, will be able to view the resource. The other option is to manually enter all of your students’ names here. 

Step 3: Share links with students to resources 

Once you have created a Student Resource folder and granted permission to everyone to view what is inside the folder, you can now share those resources easily in any application or site you like.  

• If it is a document (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), you can copy the URL from the browser window and paste that anywhere you need. Students will need to sign into Office 365, if they aren’t already, in order to view it.
  

•  If it is a PDF, before sharing the URL, you will want to use the “Open in browser” option and then share the URL.
  
  

•  If your platform allows embedding documents, you can use the embed code that is found in the “Share” menu to do so.
  
  

Step 4: An easy way to share documents quickly through Outlook Online 

A great new feature of Outlook Online is the ability to change the sharing settings of document and folders stored in OneDrive as you are writing your email. 

If any recipients don’t have access to the document, the link will turn red to remind you.

Click on the link and change the sharing settings right in your email!