I am an elementary school computer teacher and tech coordinator. I have found that many elementary school computer labs run without a server of any kind.

I feel that file servers in particular are game changers for the student's lessons. Without a place to store student work, the lessons have to conform to a single session and must be printed or saved locally on the existing computer.

With multiple users using the same computer and the chance that a computer could fail, student file security is non-existent. With a file server, students can engage in long term projects by saving their files to a central file server for later retrieval over multiple sessions. Some examples would be power point or multimedia shows where development takes place over many weeks and file collection involves images, videos, and documents.

Financial and technical issues are obstacles in the elementary education field where 99% of the staff are trained multi-subject education and commonly have only superficial technical skills. Without a solid way to save files, they resort to multiple jump-drives and take the easy road to technical education sending kids to the myriad and endless edutainment flash sites under the premise of integrating technology into the curriculum.

Real technical education is not learned by slaying dragons to the correct answer of 3 X 4 or dragging and dropping fish to balance a scale. It is found by creating and saving files in powerpoint, excel, garage band, audacity or photo-story and by creating art in programs like photo-shop.

These are things that require a fileserver for file storage.

The point is, the TKL fileserver is ideal for bringing that kind of change to education in a Mac or Windows lab. To that end, I have created a fileserver of my own with TKL fileserver and documented each step with screenshots for use by other educators / tech coordinators to implement into their schools on my K-5 computer lab website.

I present it here in the interest that it may be useful for users here whether in education or small office / home office use. http://oakdome.com/k5/tutorials/free-fileserver-for-labs/free-fileserver...