We've been tech wizards this weekend! Those people who have ever tried to wrangle a Microsoft Office Onenote folder more than a few megabytes in size will understand the task we undertook on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By today, however, the end is in sight and we have a replica of Cassy's Grade 8 English Onenote on our personal cloud space. It is a digital imprint of her hard work over the last 18 years and a repository of lessons and resources: something to look back upon in her dotage?!
The IT department here at school was the root of the digital evil. Last year they insisted on moving the large Onenote folder into a cloud space and transferring the ownership of the folder from Cassy personally to a "sharepoint" that involved the entire Middle School English team. To operate the notebook day-to-day was exactly the same and seemingly, everything was fine.
When I made some initial attempts to copy, export or transfer files, I realised that these new permissions were problematical. Even the IT guru assistants were bamboozled. I might add that these were the very same boffins who had advised the move in the first place! The head of our divisional IT then the head of the school IT got involved and in what became a spoof of "Who's on first" they argued and inquired in email merry-go-rounds as to who owned what and to whom permissions needed to be granted and generally had absolutely no clue how to do any of it!!
The biggest problem was the sharing/ownership and the second biggest problem was the size: it was nearly 4 gigabytes, a gargantuan size for a single notebook. It had multiple sections and hundreds of pages, many of which were laden with embedded video files. In the end, the expertise of the assistant Annie started the process by installing most of the files from the copy I'd managed to save in an external hard drive into my cloud account. From there I managed to download some of the files on the weekend and make new folders and pages that pretty much exactly replicates the original.
So, we've had a win! It's used up the majority of the free storage I have on my Onedrive account, but that doesn't matter...I don't need it for anything else! So, the weekend was pretty much dedicated to tech issues. I also took the opportunity to consolidate my desktop folders full of movies and TV series and copy them onto an external hard drive.
I've just realized that the previous five paragraphs might go down in blog history as the most boring ever written: sorry about that, but we're always stoked with a tech win!
Photos: We managed to snare a packet of toilet paper in the supermarket without having to fight for it Australian style, Shakespeare is in full swing here in Grade 8 English, and a shot of me at my desk: you can see that not all the posters are Shakespearean!