Student Naming Convention

[Jacques]

I read the previous discussions regarding AD design and naming conventions (ended in 2006), but I am still looking for the ultimate naming convention for students:

 

Current Convention:

Year Group-Initial + first 4 characters of last name

eg Peter Black in Year 7 will be: Y7-PBlac

 

The problem (and blessing in disguise) with this approach is that we recreate ALL 1500 students every year. The blessing is that we delete all students accounts and their home directories (mp3, jpg files ) every year.

 

Another plus for this naming convention, is that all student home directories are listed together, and makes it easy for the Teachers to get to the correct student home directories.

 

Creating the new accounts is also no problem: We export all student names from SIMS to csv - using UserCommander (from SystemTools), create all account including home directories in a few minutes.

 

The only serious flaw here is the private share of the student Home Directories. This is a manual process after the creation of the student accounts for 1500 students!

 

A few limitations because we are an international school:

1. We do not have full intakes from feeder schools - we have constant flow of students, in and out, as their parents start work in the country and leave after contract completion. So year of intake does not really make sense.

2. Having Arabic names converted to English makes for some interesting spelling differences within one family. Three siblings in one family could have their last names (in their passports) spelled differently.

3. We only give personal user accounts from Year 3 and up - Lower primary students have a Registration Group (Class) account.

 

That should be enough info to bore everybody to death!

 

Any bright ideas on a better naming scheme or how to automate the private share creation??

[laserblazer]

I've adopted the policy of the High School we feed in to. Theirs is entry year,lastname,first initial first name e.g.

10blogsf. We use the year they leave us so they keep the same username when they move up. I would suggest avoiding hyphens in names.

[User3204]

If you have AD, you can create an OU per yeargroup, so you don't have to have a "Y7" prefix. Although then you'd probably find that you get a lot of duplicate usernames.

 

You could instead, if you really want, have their year of birth as the prefix, so Year7 would be 99 (although some might be 00)

[john]

I go for this format: 08joeblo

Thats devised from the following:

• Year of entry to the school - if they come later say to Y10 or something they get the same as the rest of them in that year so its a folder per year of home drives etc
  
• first 3 letters of the first name EG peter is "pet"
  
• first 3 letters of the surname EG rathbone is rat
  

[Jacques]

Hi Laserblazer,

You are correct - we remove all hyphens ( - or ' and spaces) from their first and last names, then put it back in the user name!! That is one thing we should get rid of! Leaving year could be a plan - even if it is a probable leaving year, as our students come and go all the time!

[kmount]

We're simple beasts.

 

AB01 - Andy Black

AB02 - Anita Bloggs

 

etc.

 

Our OUs take care of our annual maintainence and as our AD is fully populated and maintained from our intranet wiping out + re-provisioning isn't a problem to us.

[Jacques]

Hi John!! Nice to hear from you!

 

Our school is Nursery - IB (Year 13) - entry year might be a little confusing, but I like the 3 + 3 idea from first name + last name.

 

It is the numeric part that is still going to be a show stopper.

I think Laserbalzer's year they will graduate is maybe workable??

[Jacques]

Hi kmount,

 

I would have loved to be able to go for something simple!! No Seriously!!

 

Problem is being in an Arabic country - halve my students have the same first name! (hence the most used name in the world) and 80% have an "AL-" or "EL-" as the first part of their last name! (eg AL-Makhoul)

 

Splitting them by Year group makes it significantly easier.

[Ric_]

We use ++ so September's year 7 will be 09JBloggs.

 

For our sixth form, we prefix their username with a '6' to give 609JBloggs.

 

Of course, these are then tidied into OUs.

 

I find that the kids can generally spell their names and making it full names helps to prevent duplicates (although I wish that I'd stripped out the hyphens!).

 

The only problem is when some mean parent names twins with the same forename initial (e.g. Jack and Jill) but this is rare and I usually just end up giving one of them a username like 09JillUpthehill.

[gaz350]

@Ric In the past 7 years we have had it happen where on 2 occassions 2 kids in the same year have the same name and toatally unrelated to each other!!! even that happens sometimes

 

we use yeargroup entered the school + full 1st name + surname.

 

although this was orginally from the days when we ran OpenLDAP and didn't cause us any problems. we sometimes run into issues when students have really long for/surnames since moving to AD.

[jcollings]

We used to use YearOfEntrySurnameInitial = 07SmithB

 

We have now moved to initials+admission number. We changed this so they have the same username on the VLE and the network. It also means their email addresses are fairly anonymous now where as before you knew their surname, initial and which year they were in.

[tech_guy]

Yeah, we go for year of leaving, first initial and surname - i.e. 09bent (yes, we do have a pupil with that name- foreign).

[powdarrmonkey]

Currently: just their uid, four digits

Previously: two of forename, five of surname, and year of entry, eg: joblogg08

[laserblazer]

This is the first year we have allocated passwords. I took the first 5 letters of the lastname and added a sequential digits in front 1-180 for each year. Miss Williams was not impressed with her password

 

Because we have used Winsuite up to now, they have simply used a drop down menu to select their username. Having to type their name and a password seems to beyond a lot of them!

[john]

Miss Williams was not impressed with her password

If Miss Williams wasn't impressed, imagine if she was called Adam Poole on my system you get the poor child being called 01adapoo imagine the fun teenagers and pre-teens have with that one!

[Jacques]

Just had a discussion with Vikpaw and Artsaudi, and keeping the same username will become even more important if we implement Learning Gateway on portal server. You realy do not want to redo them every year, and recreate them in the VLE?? It seems like the use of the student number is not a bad idea if you are useing this name as email address etc etc. It will protect them a little more than using Initials and Last Name?

 

Now we have even more reason to figure out a change of student user accounts!

[powdarrmonkey]

It seems like the use of the student number is not a bad idea if you are useing this name as email address etc etc. It will protect them a little more than using Initials and Last Name?

 

This is one of the main reasons that here, we use a number. It anonymises them just that little bit.

[K.C.Leblanc]

[start yeart][surname][initial]

 

07BloggsJ

 

We share a sixthform with the boys school next door. They use the same setup but put a random two digit number on the end. Generaly we use the same usernames when adding them onto our system.

 

My old place used to use accession numbers, this caused no end of trouble since every year the office wanted to wait longer and longer before issuing them. The last intake before I left were waiting for two weeks.

[elsiegee40]

Every school has pupils coming and going all the time, maybe an international school has a greater flow than most, but the flow is still there in all schools.

 

Prefixing the logon with 2 digits so that pupils in the same year-group are clustered together makes life easier. The actual number and exactly what it represents doesn't matter very much, you just need to keep the kids in the same year group together to ensure that permissions and access are the same for all of them.

 

We take children up to age 11, and use the year the children start in Reception, so this year's Reception class has 08 logons for the 2008/9 intake year.

 

Since the decision was made to give logons to the oldest children in our Pre-School, I also have 09 logons... these children won't start Reception until 2009-10, but that doesn't matter. Anyone who joins these classes, even if they don't start until Year 6 will have the same logon prefix as their class-mates.

[penfold]

I have used all sorts of methods in the past, but one which we seemed to settle on was year/form/intialname. This helped to prevent the duplicate names, but also for some reason I seem to have come across lots of pupils who have official names that they dont like to be know as. So you will get joe blogs come up and say hi my name is james can you reset my password(this was an accepted policy as teachers also called the pupils by their chosen name). After searching and searching you finally find that he's giving you the wrong information. Knowing the form too helps cut down that problem no end.

 

The pupils information was taken from SIMS so it was always their official names. The downside to this is if the pupils move form, especially when the teachers dont tell you.

 

Personally if I could reset them now, I think I would use a number, but when I have tried to make changes like that in the past I have been blocked by teachers. They seem to think that the pupils would struggle to remember their usernames. I think it would be the teachers who would stuggle more:rolleyes:

[kesomir]

we use:

 

+'-'++

 

eg:

 

j-bloggs2019

 

the is fixed so doesn't change and identifies the year group.

[Tony_Mc]

Hi

 

Sorry, i haven't had time to read everything so ignore me if this has already been said.

 

we use the SIMS.net Admission number. they are all unique and run through the students time at the school.

 

I am sure it has plenty of flaws but that's what we do (set up before i started)

 

Tony

[badders]

We're just about to trial email addresses using year of entry initials of firstname and surname and student admission number. Joe Blogs who started in 2005 and had an admission number of 1234 would be 05jb1234. If this works as email we will probably try to use the same format for usernames.

[7andY]

Nominal entry year + First initial + 2 letters Last name + serial number.

 

So, if Joe Bloggs is a Yr9, he would be 06JBL01.

If we had a Jill Black, she would be 06JBL02

 

...and so on...

 

My theory is that 'zero blah letter letter letter zero blah' is easier to remember!

 

7&Y

[Stuart_C]

Here I use first 4 letters of surname and then initials of Christian names.

So John S Smith would be johnss. Occasionally I hit duplicate usernames but very rarely (there are about 2 students with an additional x in their username).

 

I includes the students year of entry in their description which makes student deletion much easier.

 

I export all my new students from SIMS then run them through the Excel spreadsheet I have for user creation. It creates me text for the batch files I run to create a users account, home directory and set the permissions on it.

 

Deletion is much the same. I move the accounts of the leavers to a seperate OU get a list of the accounts and import it onto excel. That then lets me create batch files to remove their home directories and mail directories.

 

(Excel is my friend! )