Shared notebook in classroom with no server?

[doucettea]

Hi all,
Is it possible to share a notebook for 30 students in a classroom where the
school's IT won't grant a network share on the server?
Would a wi-fi hard drive work for this?
There seem to be a few 802.11g/n hard drives available for purchase, and
this seems like a good solution at first glance. According to Dave
Rasmussen's blog, however, these drives tend to run linux/samba and he claims
they aren't suitable for sharing OneNote notebooks...
Can anyone make recommendations as to how I could accomplish a shared
notebook for my classmates and me? We're in the same classroom 40 hours/week
and collaborative notetaking with audio recording in a shared OneNote
notebook seems almost ideal.
TIA,
Ari

 

[doucettea]

Thanks for the response. I'll reply in line:

You could always share a drive on one of the computers in the room and make
this computer your "server". Of course, you'll always have to have that
particular computer in the room for this to work.

How much would this tax network/cpu/hdd resources on that computer? All of
us have laptops. Would 20 or so students in OneNote cause a whole lot of R/W ?

Or, depending on the network configuration of your school, you can set this
shared drive even up on a computer not in the room.

Yeah, and I know that's a possibility. All I need is a UNC path, right? The
issue is more of getting the school's IT to let us do that...

Do you know if there are any Wi-Fi NAS devices that work well with OneNote
notebooks? I'd love to just buy one, plug it into a wall outlet in the
classroom and leave it there...