Day 13 – Sharing OneDrive files with others

09/30/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators - Day 12

Office 365 cloud services offer advantages to educators that were previously difficult to accomplish or impossible. I have mentioned that Office 365 changes the computing paradigm to one that offers easy collaboration and sharing possibilities in the cloud.

Sharing files via OneDrive is extremely easy. You can simply select a document you want to share and give others permission to it. Once a document is selected click on the Share option.

When you share a file you have a choice of giving others “editing” rights or “view only” or making the file “Public”.

If you give others editing rights they will be able to access and change the document you have shared with them. That also means they will be able to delete information within the file so only share with others that you trust. 

You also need to be careful about privacy issues when sharing files with others. You will need to use judgement and follow your organizations policies about confidentiality and data. Remember, just because you can does not mean you should, THINK.

There are however many situations when sharing is appropriate and beneficial for teaching and learning.  

When appropriate, sharing a document to others offers the advantage of ALWAYS having the most recent version of the document available to everyone that it is shared with. Unlike email where you send a static attachment, sharing a file from OneDrive to others ensures access to a living and breathing document so to speak.

No more attachment tag where you send out a document to others, then some poor soul must collect the changes made by others and merge the changes into a new document. For documents that require collaboration this is a HUGE improvement in workflow.

As we have been prepping for our faculty/staff Office 365 migration I shared a spreadsheet with a colleague so we could BOTH update the document at the same time. Once you have experienced this co-authoring capability you will wonder how you ever survived without it.

 Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

Twitter: @tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc