gmail how to distinguish between student and teacher

[k-strider]

we now have a student and a teacher with the same name... obviously the format of the email address should mean people don’t email the wrong person, but I’m wondering if anyone has done anything else in google workspace to make this a bit more obvious? a bit like when it says your emailing externally?

[JJonas]

our student email is eg AStudent7ABC@

staff is eg TeacherA@

 

This helps separate student and staff accounts and the random element of the student account helps to prevent students getting unwanted emails.

[jthompson]

We populate the "Job Title" and "Department" fields in the Directory. Staff will have suitable entries there, but all students will have a job title of "Student" and a department of "Year X".

 

 

If we were faced with a staff member and a student with matching display names, I'd be tempted to add (Student) onto the end of the student's display name, and maybe (Staff) onto the staff member's display name.

 

Edit: I'd probably leave the staff member's display name as is.

Edited July 13, 2021 by jthompson

[hardtailstar]

All our students have the year their year group starts so for September it'll be 21BloggsJ

 

Staff are all Bloggs.J

Edited July 13, 2021 by hardtailstar

[caffrey]

Students are initials, roll number and the surname is in capitals

 

We also set the user image for students to a standard image to help (Also helps with different year groups)

[jthompson]

With Gmail, if your students and staff are all available to staff in the directory, having different address formats won't really help much against users typing in recipients by display name. I think that's where having an indicator of some type in the display name itself or the profile image would be most helpful.

 

If it was still an issue after doing putting in place something like that, I suppose you could just hide that particular student from the directory, but then you're still going to have some staff able to pick the wrong recipient if that student is already in their recent contacts. At which point, you're into content compliance rules, where internal messages to that student are only delivered if the subject line starts with a particular keyword.

[k-strider]

We populate the "Job Title" and "Department" fields in the Directory. Staff will have suitable entries there, but all students will have a job title of "Student" and a department of "Year X".

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]62570[/ATTACH]

 

If we were faced with a staff member and a student with matching display names, I'd be tempted to add (Student) onto the end of the student's display name, and maybe (Staff) onto the staff member's display name.

 

Edit: I'd probably leave the staff member's display name as is.

 

Do you use Google Cloud Directory Sync to pull these through or something like GAM to set them by OU?

[jthompson]

Do you use Google Cloud Directory Sync to pull these through or something like GAM to set them by OU?

 

GCDS. We populate AD with it initially, then sync those fields to Google. One of our rollover tasks at the start of each academic year is to bulk update the "Year X" values in AD.

 

You could do that just as easily with GAM, though. Not sure of the command(s) off the top of my head, but a CSV based command ought to do it for you.

Edited July 13, 2021 by jthompson

[paulkerton]

Do you use Google Cloud Directory Sync to pull these through or something like GAM to set them by OU?

 

We don't do GCDS, so if that's you too (or anyone) I'd do the update by spreadsheet to be honest.

Really quick to filter by OU and just populate every student.

[TechMonkey]

We set all staff avatars to their school photo and all pupils to the school logo. Instant visual check that a pupil is among staff. Still needs staff to look and click that one of these is not like the others.

[kingoranks]

Also add STAFF to staff account