Take Your Files (&email!) With You Using OneDrive Graduation
This post shares another answer to commonly asked questions from schools I engage with:
How do students take their files with them when they graduate?
Here is the answer in a Tweet from the inimitable Mike Tholfsen:
https://twitter.com/mtholfsen/status/1130844389469638657
The direct link to the guides are here:
What Is Included?
Sync your school-provided OneDrive to your computer - This gives you a connection to your school-provided OneDrive on your local computer.
Create a new personal OneDrive account if you don't already have one - This will become the new location for all of your files once you've finished moving them from your school-provided OneDrive.
Sync your personal OneDrive to your computer - This gives you a connection to what will become the new home for your files on your local computer.
Move your OneDrive files - Move your files from your school-provided OneDrive account to your new, personal OneDrive account. You can do this using File Explorer or Mac Finder. All files you place in your synced OneDrive folder automatically upload to the cloud whenever you're online.
Move a OneNote notebook to OneDrive - You’ll need to use different steps to move your OneNote notebooks.
What Is Missing?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this is a OneDrive tool, it does not include any sort of email migration which would be super handy. For a student to be able to migrate their email history from their school Office365 account to an Outlook.com account would complete this Graduation Tool nicely.
The good news is, there are plenty of options for importing email from other provides like Gmail and if you wanted to bring your O365 email from school into your outlook.com account then simply go to settings (direct link here) and select "Sync Email":
Choose "Other email accounts" and enter your O365 Credentials:
You'll notice there are two options above in terms of importing the email from the "old" school account to appear in the matching folders in the new @outlook.com account such creating a combined inbox, sent folder etc. This is more streamlined but many students may like to keep their school email separate from their new account and can create a subfolder structure by choosing the second option - this ends up looking as follows:
In case you're wondering, the bob@minecraft.sammcneill.me is a real O365 email address in a demo tenant I set up (expires soon) so it proves you can pull through the email from O365 to Outlook.
My Point of View:
This is a great move from the OneDrive.com team as it easily allows students to follow a simple step to take their important files and folders with them. Critically, the content from a OneNote Class NoteBook is often the main record of student learning and this is also guided in terms of how to move this.
As I've demonstrated above, it's not hard for students to also move their school email on to their new account, providing a complete digital record of their learning and communication as they graduate into their next stage of education or into the workforce.
One more "end of year task" has now been simplified for educators and students alike!