A Digital School Bag

In our third in-class session we talked about the digital school bag (“digitale Schultasche”). The digital school bag is a collection of open source software that is installed on a flash pen drive that can also contain all the required personal data of the user. The use of the digital school bag offers a highly flexible and consistent working environment since you can work with it at home and in school and basically on any computer with a Windows operating system. Besides the fact that you have all the data and programs you need on a small portable device this method offers many additional advantages. The digital school bag is free of charge and since no additional software has to be installed, there are no problems concerning the incompatibility of documents and programs and no additional disk space on the operating computer is required. However the digital software is only available for windows and depending on the speed of the pen drive used, the programs may work slower then usually.

The digital school bag can be downloaded from the German website of the Medienzentrum Kassel. The only requirement is a flash pen drive (at least 20 MB/s reading and 10 MB/s writing) with a capacity of at least one Gigabyte (however a two Gigabyte pen drive is recommended) that should be used only for this purpose. The website also provides a short manual und some frequently asked questions.