TouchDevelop with Office 365 accounts / KS3&4 students

[sonofsanta]

This is probably a question for @jamesbmarshall and @EduTech more than anyone, but who knows what wondrous insights lurk in the dark corners of all your minds!

 

Our Head of IT wanted to use TouchDevelop for some basic app development at KS3 & 4, but the web app requires signing in with either a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or Facebook ID - all of which are blocked for lower school to avoid timewasting and pastoral issues around personal email.

 

Every student has an Office 365 ID but it seems that Microsoft account and a Microsoft Online Services account (i.e. O365) are fundamentally different

 

Is there any way of using their school account to sign in, or a way of allowing them to set their school account up as also being a Live account without it a) messing things up b) giving them access to personal Hotmail/Outlook webmails once the appropriate URLs are unblocked?

[jamesbmarshall]

Every student has an Office 365 ID but it seems that Microsoft account and a Microsoft Online Services account (i.e. O365) are fundamentally different

 

Correct. Microsoft Accounts (formerly Windows Live ID) are different to your Organisational Account (Office 365 ID, ORG-ID, MOS-ID). It is possible to have both associated, i.e. you can sign up for a Microsoft Account to access Skype, OneDrive, etc. with an Organisational Account but they're still separate; this means no institutional management or control of the Microsoft Account bit.

 

Is there any way of using their school account to sign in, or a way of allowing them to set their school account up as also being a Live account without it a) messing things up b) giving them access to personal Hotmail/Outlook webmails once the appropriate URLs are unblocked?

 

Having a Microsoft Account associated with an Office 365 Organisational Account won't mess things up, but it does introduce a management challenge.

[EduTech]

Hi,

 

TouchDevelop requires the use of a Microsoft Account (formally known as Hotmail) and does not support the use of Microsoft Organizational Accounts (Office 365, Windows Azure etc.)

 

If you were to Sign-Up for a Microsoft Account using your Organization Account to use this service, You would still require access to Microsoft Account (LiveID) Services. If you are able to unblock these services during this time then that will be fine

 

Personally, I don't know what you view is on allowing users to sign-up for a Microsoft Account using their Organization Account as obviously when they loose access to this E-Mail Service (i.e. when they leave) the Microsoft Account won't be very helpful to them.

 

I hope that helps answer your question, although understand it does not actually allow you to do what you want. :-)

 

Regards,

James.

[sonofsanta]

Alas! I suspected that would be the answer. I don't think there's going to be a way of allowing sign up/sign in without also unblocking outlook.com and granting them access to personal email accounts, which I don't want to do. It would be fine if it were for KS5, who are allowed access to their own emails, but it's far too simplistic for them. We could unblock on a lesson by lesson basis, but that restricts them from doing their homework in school once they're outside the scope of the lesser filtering.

 

I imagine there's very little chance of anyone at the TouchDevelop team being able to add MSOL as a login option? It's the perfect resource for students to learn with, walled off behind a requirement to log in with exactly the sort of services that are blocked in schools for the targeted age range