ssh tunnel between pc and mac?

hi,
i’m a lowly student stuck up in connecticut for school. At school i have an IBM thinkpad w/ windows xp sp2 and at home i have a g4 powermac w/ os X 10.3.5. i need to send files between my laptop and mac, prefferably encrypted. so far i’ve only been able to setup a ftp server on my mac (using built in ftp file sharing option) and connect to it from my laptop using filezilla (plain text ftp- no encryption). when i try to connect to port 22 for ssh it doesn’t work. what am i doing wrong? i know os x has ssh1 and 2 built in. note that i have NO 3rd party fire walls on my mac- just the built in one and i’m on a netgear wireless router at school- no 3rd party software firewall. can anyone offer some suggestions?