I greatly appreciate all the comments on my earlier post and on Twitter regarding protocols for student usernames. I brought your collective wisdom to a meeting of the other tech coordinators and our director of IT. We had another good conversation as we tried to find a way get graduation year into the username, since that would allow us to manage student accounts as groups in platforms such as Edublogs which does not have any tools for grouping users.
We knew we needed to get the graduation year on the front of the username, since that would allow us to sort users or search by that. We realized that using just the last two digits would suffice. Unfortunately, with a school as large as ours, gradyearlastname was not going to be a unique identifier, there would be duplicates.
Middle and high school teachers have been HUGE fans of our current lastnameID# protocol since it made it easier for them to identify students from username in Blackboard, Sharepoint, Google Docs, etc. However, gradyearlastnameID# was getting ridiculously long and more challenging to implement. We even looked at changing the admission’s office procedure so that ID number rather than being consecutive would have the graduation year built into it. After much discussion we decided that ID number was the one thing that has never changed over the years, and for now, we didn’t have a compelling enough reason to mess with it, given all the problems we could foresee if it were mucked up.
In the end, our decision came down to this…
- The Tech Advisory Council was comfortable with letting students retain their blogs, Google Docs for Education, and other accounts after graduation. The blogs, wikis and other parts of their web presence will still be bound by our acceptable use policy, so we can delete the accounts and their products if they violate that policy. Otherwise, since our Google Docs and Edublogs accounts allow us unlimited users, we will let them persist, which means we don’t need a way to weed out accounts when students leave or graduate.
- Using student last names for middle and high school students seemed to make sense, although we could make a case for keeping middle school students using first names, we decided that since they receive their own Edublog, Google Docs and Powerschool accounts in sixth grade, it would be most useful for the students if those same accounts followed them through high school.
- Since we are not deleting online accounts, it is less of a problem for students to blog in elementary school and then switch to a new blog in grade 6. They can link to the old blog.
Based on all of that, we are sticking with our original plan for next year, which is middle and high school students using lastnamestudentID# and intermediate students using firstnamestudentID#. I’d like to say that we were completely comfortable with this decision, but we were not. Niggling in the back of our brains was the feeling that in the future, we were going to regret not finding a way to work in graduation year. For now, the reasons to do so just weren’t compelling enough to overcome the problems it created. In a few years, you can all say, “We told you so!”