Private tutors work with students across different schools, grade levels, and tech comfort levels. Collecting work from each student should be consistent and simple.

The tutor's challenge

You tutor 10 students. Each uses a different email provider, some are on their parent's phone, and one writes homework by hand and needs to photograph it. Email becomes a mess of different thread formats and attachment styles.

The simplest approach:

  1. Create an upload page: "Maria — Math Homework Week 3"
  2. Send the link to Maria (or her parents)
  3. Maria uploads her work
  4. You download and review before the next session

For ongoing work, create a single upload page per student:

Students upload all their work to the same link throughout the tutoring engagement. Set the expiration to 10 days, and before it expires, download everything and create a new link.

For photographed homework

Many younger students (or students doing math by hand) need to photograph their work. An upload link handles this perfectly — they take photos with their phone and upload directly from the camera roll. No compression, no blurry email attachments.

Tip: ask the student to take one photo per page, in landscape orientation, under normal room light. The dashboard preview makes it easy to spot a photo that's too blurry to read before the next session — you can ask for a re-upload rather than losing time during a lesson.

Parent involvement

For younger students, you're often communicating with parents, not the student directly. Share the upload link with parents and explain: "Have [student name] photograph their completed worksheet and upload it here before our Thursday session."

A password-protected page adds a small safeguard: only parents you sent the password to can submit, which matters if the student's phone is borrowed or the link gets forwarded accidentally.

Keeping organized

Create a simple folder structure on your computer:

/Students
  /Alex
    /Week1
    /Week2
  /Maria
    /Week1
    /Week2

Download each student's ZIP into the corresponding week folder.

Billing and session records

If you charge per session or per assignment reviewed, the upload timestamps double as a session log. You see exactly when each student submitted, which informs billing when a student claims they "sent it last week." For audit purposes, the ZIP filenames and mod-dates are sufficient evidence of what was delivered and when.

Group tutoring and study groups

For small group sessions (math competition teams, writing workshops), a shared upload page works well. Give every participant the same link. Their names on each upload keep submissions distinguishable, and you download one ZIP of everyone's work at once. Peer review becomes easier when everyone's material is in one folder instead of scattered across inboxes.

FAQ

Do students need an account? No. They just open the link and drop files — no email verification, no signup. This is especially important for students on borrowed phones or shared devices.

What if a parent wants to review before the tutor does? Share the upload-page link with the parent too. Students upload, parents can re-open the link and upload a revised version if they want. Each upload is kept — you see the full submission history.

Can I restrict to photos only? Yes. Set allowed extensions to jpg, jpeg, png, heic and any non-image upload is rejected client-side. Useful when you only want handwritten work scans and don't want to receive random PDFs.

How do I archive old homework? Download the ZIP for each student on a regular schedule (weekly or monthly) and move it to your own filing system. Upload pages expire automatically, so the server side stays clean.

Is it safe for under-13 students? No student account is created on getfiles.app, and no personal data is required beyond an optional name field (which the parent can leave blank). This makes it COPPA-friendlier than tools that require per-student accounts.