Student Home Directories 

As I mentioned in the introduction, the physical layout of a classroom is as important as anything else. Until January, the students were pretty much stuck at whatever workstation was assigned to them the first day of class because all of their files ended up saved to the hard disk of that machine. (Many of the files were too big to fit on a floppy.) This created tremendous problems when I needed to separate students who were creating disruptions. 

Over a couple of flu days, I managed to fix this problem. The ATC has a small server that is more than capable of acting as a file server, so I decided to put it to good use. I created “home directories” for all the students in the Office Tech department. A home directory takes the place of My Documents when the students login to their local machines. Anytime they save something to My Documents, it actually goes to the server. This way, no matter what machine the students login to, they can access their files. Now, I can move students around with ease, without even having to reconfigure a machine. What’s more, Mr. Mayabb and I can now backup every student’s work from one central location!