By Steph Larkin, reporter

When students are given assignments to turn in online, they often don’t realize they can save their work directly to the student website, PPCCOnline (or D2L), where they turn papers in. Saving to D2L reduces the likelihood that they will lose important assignments.

Flash drives get broken or lost easily, email can get deleted or corrupted and public file sharing like Google Docs can be confusing to use. The college computers are not a good place for students to save their work directly, because of the lack of privacy of public computers and the fact that PPCC computers delete desktop work after each day.

It is a better idea to use a flash drive and upload method, and then save assignments to the student Desire 2 Learn (D2L) website.

Here’s how:

The first thing to do is make sure your work is saved temporarily somewhere on your computer, on a flash drive or on a computer desktop.

Next, log in with a preset password and your S# username.

Then, select a specific class on the website after logging in.

Under Course Material, click on the word ‘Locker’ in the drop-down menu to bring you to a new page in the site.

To save your work, click on upload and find the work you saved before on a different device.

Open your file in the upload screen and hit upload.

Your work will be saved in the D2L site and won’t be erased like on a school desktop.

You can select the class the assignment is for, but the locker will store and show all assignments for all classes that have been saved so it doesn’t matter which one you click on.

The locker can be accessed almost any time you’re able to get on the internet. The only time it wouldn’t would be if the school was doing maintenance, but even then, the site will never lose your work.

The Locker holds up to 9.77 MB of data which is actually a large amount. PDF files are large so it can’t hold a whole lot of them, but the site can still hold dozens of Microsoft Word files at once and for as long as you remain a student at PPCC.

You can save files, edit them, and overwrite unfinished work.

Locker also tells you the last time you worked on assignments, and how much space an assignment is taking up, so you can delete work from past semesters to make room for new writing if you need to.

It’s safer to save your work on D2L than on a flash drive or on a desktop because it will stay on the internet in a safe place. It isn’t hard to save material onto D2L so you shouldn’t have a problem keeping work intact. You can even keep your work for a few years if you need to.

You can also download directly from the Locker to the Assignments box so assignments cannot be lost or corrupted.

Hopefully, this will inspire your instructors to inform you and teach you how to use D2L Locker, but feel free to print out these instructions. At this time of the semester, we students need all the help we can get.

Leave your comments for Steph at ppccpaper.org or reach her at paper@ppcc.edu