Login name/IDs - Student & Staff

Posted by Dirk D Dykstra at 6/15/2005 9:50 PM and is filed under Educational Technology,Student Work

A Colleague's Comments:

Currently only our secondary students have logins.  I want all students to have logins, but I'm not sure how to set up Kindergarten/1st grade.  Do you give all students logins?  If so, how do you handle the lower grades? 


My Comments:

I was tasked a number of years to solve some of the problems of logins you are referring to. The support staff wanted a login that was tied to the year the student graduated so that the class stayed together, the login did not change and the network admins could do the yearly updates easily. The teachers did not want to use the ID number, because they always had to look it up, they wanted something that you could figure out with the student's name. The teachers also wanted the IDs and related network folders to sort by last name as their roll call, grade book and other resources do. The administrators wanted to be able to identify anyone who was causing a problem on the network using only their network login - you know - monitoring, messaging, etc.
 
Here is what I developed. Everywhere I have used it is a success story.
 
06DYKSTDIR  or  6DYKSTDIR
 
The 06 or 6 is the year they graduate - 2006.
The next five characters are from their last name - Dykstra.
The next three characters are from their first name - Dirk.
 
This system has very few duplicates and the staff and students learn those rapidly. Every student and teacher knows the login for everyone. It is easy for a teacher to check and make sure a student is not using someone else's login. It is also easy for the network admin to track who is using what resource.
 
Since it is built from their name and uses the graduation year, it never changes unless they fail a grade level. For the lower grades we gave the teachers a password list. Once the students entered Junior High/Middle School, they were responsible for their own password. I then setup all the computer teachers so that they could reset passwords. I encourage them to have a small penalty for the student if they do this more than once a six weeks and that eliminates most problems remembering passwords. It helps if they teach the students how to create passwords.
 
Here are some samples of unusual ones.
 
07REY--ROB  -  Robert Rey 2007  (Here we use dashes when the name is less than five.)
11CHANGWE  -  We Chang 2011  (On the first name you can use the dashes or just leave it.)
 
4SMITHBOB2  -  Bob Smith 2004  (This is for the second Bob Smith.)
 
Good luck,
 
Dirk D Dykstra
 
PS - For the staff I use their full name - dirkdykstra - as their login for all the network and all their other programs, such as AR. This allows me to use either manual synchronization or auto synchronization such as Novell's Identity Manager. For mid-sized schools and up, I strongly recommend this approach and either Identity Manager or similar project. That way you only create a user once, change a password once, etc and the information is synchronized to all the other applications.

 
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