In recent testing of smarthomework we've found a couple of user scenarios that are causing some possibly unexpected behaviour in smarthomework.

Please share point 1 with your teaching staff in school as it relates to their expectations for file sharing in the Google Drive environment.

1. The option “learners get a copy of the file” is designed only for the use of Google Document types. You can upload any file type though if using other files types the learners will not have the edit in place options and will need to make a copy. For example, if you attach a .docx and make a copy it will make the copies of the .docx, to be able to edit the .docx the learner must select the option "edit in Google docs" from the preview provided. This will make another copy of the document which the learner would then have to upload and send back as an attachment to the teacher.

You can easily identify the document type by looking at the icon.

Google Doc Types:

Non Google Documents


If a teacher has a document in one of these formats they can easily open in first as a Google document and then share that new version.


2. There is a small bug in that in a few homework items a link to the teacher's original document is being shown in the guidance area for learners. As the learners have no permission to view this document the result is a request for access. Whilst this is a combination of user error and a bug it's been a difficult one for us to fix. We've implemented a fix for that as of now.