How do you manage External Sharing of Drive files

[dbugden]

Hi Everyone!

I am just wondering how everyone currently manages external file sharing within their schools. We currently have external sharing limited to only EDU accounts, which is creating some limitations for teachers who would like to be able to share documents more easily with families. We would like to support this collaboration, but also want to ensure that we have it set up in a way that ensures security etc.

I would love to know how your schools currently have this setup, and what you have found from a security perspective. If we are to move towards opening up external sharing more freely, we just want to ensure we have all of the appropriate security and privacy settings in place to limit potential risks.

Thanks everyone!

Dave

[Michael_Roop]

We tend to share "parent and family" type things through our SIS.

[Michael_Roop]

To expound a bit on this, we have 4 tiers of communication. 

Student communication. 

11th-12th grade Student communication (as some internships and early college has requirements)

Direct to parent/family communication (through our SIS system)

Parent/family general communication (posted on Social Media and the front of our web page).

[dbugden]

Thanks Michael! That makes sense. We use SEESAW and TASS for most of our parent communition, but there are a lot of situations where we want teachers and parents to be able to collaborate in real time on a doc/slide. Just not sure on the security implications of allowing this.

[jwisniewski]

We use Canvas for our learning management system. Teachers can communicate with parents through Canvas or email. What do they need to share with parents that can't be accessed through existing systems or the child's account. For reference, we are a 1:1 district. 

[dbugden]

Thanks for your response! That makes sense. We use SEESAW and TASS for most of our parent communication, but as we are a special ed setting we have a lot of NDIS documents that we need to collaborate on with parents, so we currently do a lot of downloading and sending PDF's. It would be a lot easier to share files directly for collaboration with parents, but we would need to look at opening up our Google settings for this.

[jwisniewski]

Be careful with this. Any documents that deal with student information should be handled on secure systems. If someone makes a mistake in the sharing settings, information could be exposed. How would you insure MFA on these types of documents? 

[kaned]

We had played with this setting last year with the hopes of doing internal/Edu sharing and found that it broke so many collaborative things.

We do try to share things with our SIS/LMS with our community, however, there are times where it simply makes sense to do this with Google.

Google forms for grants/colleges, sharing with parents, other outside organizations we work with, etc.  

I couldn't seem to make a exhaustive allow list of domains.  There were simply too many people that were using "Gmail.com" addresses for me to have this make sense.

[dbugden]

Thanks for your response Kaned! That sounds like a similar situation to us. There are a lot of times in our collaborative planning processes that we want parents to be able to work collaboratively on a doc/slide with teachers, but to do this we would have to open up sharing to all external domains which creates some security questions.

[Kim_Nilsson]

We don't (technically) restrict Google Drive sharing, at all. Of course, in policy it is said to limit according to content.

However, we don't manage any sensitive information in Google Drive, at all.