Anyone know how to survive as a teacher without a laptop or access to network files at home?

I'm a school network admin and I try to be as liberal as possible; it's all about facilitating work in a safe manner. But things are blocked for a reason, one of these being protecting from viruses and services like Dropbox are definitely a vector for such infections. That said, occasionally I need to get around the restrictions myself. For example, I need to see if a web service is working properly for visitors from outside the campus network, so I do some shenanigans with proxying (via a protocol called SSH) to my home server so, in effect, the connection from my browser is coming "from home". Simplest thing, as already suggested, is to get a thumb drive. Slightly more "heavyweight" is to get a Western Digital drive http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001F9LY14/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/, which has huge capacity, but doesn't need an external power supply. Also, you can set an iPod, if you have one, to "Disk Mode" (it's an option in iTunes when you're synching) so you can copy actual files to it, in addition to your music. The iPod becomes in effect an external drive like a thumb-drive. Good for "stealth mode" file transfers ;) More complex, if you have some tech smarts is to look at http://portableapps.com/, install it on your thumb-drive or iPod (I use my iPod) and use the following apps: - http://portableapps.com/node/12372, which (when run) uses the http://www.torproject.org/ to facilitate your web access. - http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable, giving you an alternative web browser on your thumb-drive. I keep one of these handy for all those times I'm stuck with plain old Explorer on someone else's computer. - Run Portable Firefox, go to addons.mozilla.org and install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275. So now you can run Tor and Firefox from your thumb drive, and click on the Tor Button icon in Firefox, which will tell it to use the Tor network for web access. (You might need to configure your toolbar in Firefox so it has the Tor button available, and Tor can take a few minutes to settle down when you start it, ie before it will actually connect you to the Internet.) You can get to blocked websites including Dropbox, and the activity should be invisible to your network admins. Of course, this kind of thing might be against your school's policies or whatever, so you might decide it's too complex and sneaky to be worth the trouble, but it's included for completeness ;) The only time this stuff hasn't worked for me is when I was on a secure .mil network, and they'd locked down absolutely everything.

are you needing to transfer over 16gigs back and forth? if not - why not just use a thumb drive? small, portable, easy to use and copy to. you can even encrypt the whole thing if you're worried about losing it and the students finding it.

Teachers did manage to perform their jobs even before the Internet. What are the specific tasks and files you need access to? Is it for lesson planning time or foor actual teaching? How do other teachers do it? If it's for lesson planning and other non-teaching time, maybe you can arrange an hour or two per day at home, where you can work unfettered.

And yes, keychain drives (mine is 32Gb, nadawi. Therefore, I rock.) are super-convenient. Definitely get one that attaches firmly to your keys, though, or it's going to go walkies very quickly. And encrypt it.

I often don't feel like carrying my (personal) laptop into school, where we don't have wireless in most of the building anyway (including my classroom -- and I only have one [working] ethernet jack!), so I frequently email files to myself. It works fine, but then I generally do know what I need access to in advance (or I can get the file the next day). It only takes a couple of seconds when gathering things up at the end of the day for me. My home printer doesn't work well, so for things I definitely need to print at school the next day that are crucial (exams, etc.), I generally email *and* USB key in to have some 'just in case' redundancy. The emailed document is usually quicker to access for me than the one on the USB key. The biggest timewaste for me in the process is actually converting from a Pages file on my laptop to pdf (if I've finished the document) or .doc (if I'm still working on it), since I have an iBook at home and a PC (UGH) at school, but I figure that since it was my decision to buy iWork instead of Office, I've got to live with needing to do that. I generally would not expect off-site access to a school's system (although we do finally have complete access from anywhere via internet to our electronic gradebooks, which is pretty exciting). But yeah, in short, I email what I need to myself and, honestly, keep as little on the school PC (which I hate) as possible. If I need the Internet in my classroom on my laptop when I've brought it in, I use the wired connection in my room.

You shouldn't have to pay much for a wireless card; you can get PCMCIA or USB variants. In the UK, I would not pay more than UKP30 so I guess that's less than $50 if you're in the US. The setting up can be a bit awkward if you've never done it before, e.g. entering the encryption type and the pass-phrase. Macs make this much easier than PCs ;)

Thanks for all the suggestions! I have started to investigate all these different options and will check at school on Monday to see if the firewall blocks all these other websites as well. I have gotten in touch with them about un-blocking Dropbox, but I'm not sure they'll do it. The GSpace add-on seems like it might work really well, but there is a big scary disclaimer on it saying that if GMail changes the way it runs it might not work properly. If none of those websites seem to work, I think I might just go with a large USB drive like BrokenEnglish suggested. Does anyone know how expensive wireless laptop cards are?

At every school I have ever worked at, it was against the rules to bring your personal electronics such as laptops or printers into the building, mainly for the security of the item itself and for network security. So that option might not be available to the OP.

You could try setting up WebDAV. That's easy to set up with some web hosts. Connecting to it via OS X is easy. You could also hit it via a web browser and you should be able to map it as a drive under Windows. I'd probably go with Google Docs and/or some sort of portable drive. Google Docs can import the Microsoft Office format for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. And it can also import PDFs. So, if you create your stuff with iWork, you can just print to PDF and upload those to Google Docs.