Setup drop-box folder on external drive for multiple Macs

Greetings,
I have a classroom full of photography students who need to turn in 4GB folders with pictures in them so that the teacher can grade them. We've discussed various options for facilitating this, with the only feasible solution we can come up with being setting up an external 2TB MyBook and having the kids go up, plug in the firewire and xfer their folder to the drive (see requirements below for why this is the feasible solution). One snag with this is that I want to set it up so that when the drive mounts, it's mounted as a drop-box share to prevent plagiarism as well as kids deleting/messing with other kids' projects. The problem is that each computer has different profiles so when the drop-box is setup correctly on one computer, another computer is plugged in and the folders are wide open again. Since I obviously can't setup the permissions for each profile on each computer, what options do I have to set this up? I'm open to different ideas/different ways to accomplish this, but here are the requirements:
- Drop-box-like functionality. Students can basically "submit" work, but only the teacher can view the files.
- Preferably the device needs to be hardwired to the MBP using Firewire. USB is too slow and these are wireless laptops without benefit of having any ethernet jacks accessible to them. They are all connecting through an Airport Extreme and xferring 4GB files wirelessly is not an option due to class time restraints.
- This has to work across 30 laptops with multiple user profiles.
- If software is a suggestion, free and/or OSS is preferable since this problem will be mitigated next school year with implementation of iMacs and Xserves in this program.

I would love how to do this as well. I actually tried moving a .mbox file out of ~/Library/Mailboxes/Mail and onto an external hard drive. Then I created an alias of the .mbox file and put it back into ~/Library/Mailboxes/Mail. No luck.

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