Hello, everyone. I'm just now starting to get a handle on this new idea of "Repositories," but I wanted to see if I could get some suggestions on how to handle our implementation.
Here’s my situation. How we were doing things is that an instructor and I had folders for images, organized by Unit and Lesson. We also had a folder for “Additional Resources” -- documents to read, spreadsheets to fill out, that kind of thing.
Right now, I see no Repository that A.) we can upload files to through the File Picker, and B.) we both have access to.
I understand that we no longer have to create folders and files for images – we can insert them directly into a page and they become “part of” the page itself, no need for an explicit file structure. It took some getting used to, but I think I'm okay with that now (except for the delay between removing the image and having it being deleted from the nebulous place it's stored).
But what about PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, or other types of documents? Especially because we’re referencing the same documents several times, sometimes throughout one lesson (“Refer to Dunlop’s spreadsheet” on several pages inside a lesson, for example) sometimes in different lessons.
I thought the instructor or I can upload files to our “Private files” repository, and then link to them inside of a Lesson but we don’t have the ability to link to each other’s files, I don’t think (plus, I just ran an experiment on that and couldn’t get a link to a PDF I uploaded to even work when I clicked on it, let alone students).
We could feasibly use a separate external repository, like Google Docs, but I’m unhappy with that because I would like to keep things within Moodle as much as possible.
The third option I know of is below, the File System Repository, but I’m not sure I’m clear on how well it will work. Will our new Folders show up in the left menu of the File Picker? Can we easily upload files to that “folder” FROM Moodle, or do we need to use FTP to do so?
http://docs.moodle.org/en/File_system_repository_configuration
Does anyone have any idea on how best to accomplish my two goals? Shared access to a folder that we can interact with and upload to within Moodle?