With document retention periods ranging from days to years, document-management specialists Arena Group are working to save schools from storage and retrieval problems. The company’s mstore software, an electronic document and records management system (EDRMS), helps school staff to stick to requirements from the Data Protection Act 1998, which state that schools should not keep records for any longer than necessary.

Any experienced English teacher knows the drill: on the dreaded due date, students bring printed copies of their essays to class, where we collect them, take them home, jot inscrutable comments in the margins, bring them back to class, return them, and then watch students promptly toss them in the recycling bin on the way out of the room. The whole cycle borders on farce.

Students pretend to spend many hours writing their papers, teachers pretend to spend many hours grading them, and we all pretend like repeating this process over and over again leads to something we in education like to call “student growth.” But teachers can finally put an end to this exercise in futility, thanks to an unlikely hero sometimes condemned for its unrelenting pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good… Google.

Google has tripled free storage space, across Gmail, Google+ and Drive, bringing the total to 15GB.

This is a serious move by Google as it places the company at the forefront of cloud based solutions with other institutions working to tight financial constraints. Having turned to Google Drive as my main storage facility, I thought I would highlight some advantages of using the platform through 'how to' videos.

Advantages

• Access files anytime on any device with an internet connection.
• Work offline with documents.
• Share files/documents with others and collaborate in real time.
• Share folders with students and receive and feedback on assignments.
• Allow read only access on documents and share with students as resource with no photocopying.
• Save a document in a variety of formats.
• Works with other Google Apps to provide platform for forms, surveys, projects.
• Save to GoogleDrive with two taps of an icon or clicks of a mouse.
• Search files in Drive for name or keyword.