Pupil Email addresses

[saundersmatt]

I know this is a really sad thing to be looking at on a saturday night, but i'm ill and only got up at 6pm today.

Anyway, came accross the following

Q2.6.57 Are pupils email addresses created in such a way as to protect their Name, Age & Gender?

It's something i'd never considered before, but the more i think about it the more it seems to make sense to do so.

So, can you all answer the question for me please, and let me know what you do.

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[ThatBoringBloke]

Hmmm, interesting. They are protected from identifying their gender, but their name and age can be easilly worked out from the addresses. 8O

[SimpleSi]

In my primarys pupils are given usernames such as Whitefield1, Whitefield2 etc (where Whitefield is the school name).

 

THis works Ok for groups of 30 pupils (The logins can be reused by each class but its normally just Y3 who use them).

 

regards

 

Simon

[MkII]

We use colours for pupil system accounts, that are also used for email accounts, for this very reason. A year group per colour, which we rotate leaving a year spare. Then colour shares obviously follow these groups.

[GrumbleDook]

Due to the software we use it has always taken firstnamesurname@

 

is not a .sch.uk so we cover ourselves there ... and from next year I will be doing @ ... but we have just go to sort out how we are changing the admission numbers instead of just incrementing them ... making a clean break between years.

 

It will mean a change of user id for all students (presently ... I *really* don't want to use these as the email addresses ... ginving year and name out in one go!!!

[danIT]

we use something like acc534@.sch.uk

 

the children can use firstname.lastname@.sch.uk also but we encourage them to use acc543 format as this is also there login details for the internet.

[Ric_]

The problem with turning a pupil into a number is that they are more likely to forget it and then won't use the system that you've spent £££££ on and lovingly set up for them.

 

The Becta advise is that these details should not be immediately obvious. If you didn't work in a school for instance, you wouldn't really know what the admission year part meant and by using an initial rather than the first name you hide the kids' genders. This only leaves the surname available to the nasty elements (which you could truncate if you want to get anal about it).

 

IMHO it is a recommendation that you should comply with in what you deem to be a practicable way. If you use obscure usernames you will only end up with kids saying "sir, i've forgotten my username" which will annoy you as much as the current "sire, I've forgotten my password" does now!

[Netman]

All my usernames and email addys are in the format jobl0811 where joe blogs has a birthday on the 8th November. This was the best scheme I could come up with that was both easy to remember and wasn't a dead givaway of the kid's name or age.

It's also really easy to pull the details off the MIS and concatenate it in Excel to produce the usernames....

[Ric_]

@Netman: Now you've explained it to us though, we know when their birthdays are

 

It just shows that you are going to give away some personal information, whatever 'sensible' naming scheme is used.

[Netman]

...If I had the time I'd write a script that would message each user on their birthday and wish them many happy returns!!!

But seriously, if you did know that the numbers were their birthday, you'd still not know whether they were 16 or 60, which is the crux of the matter really...

As with others, we have ditched the use of .sch.uk domains to give us that little bit more anonymity.

Like Ric said, I really didn't want to go with some random number which would just lead to countless calls saying 'I've forgot my username' !!! But I also wanted to follow the Becta guidelines!! Hmm... rock and hard place springs to mind...

[webman]

Just sha1 or md5 their firstname + lastname to generate a unique username. Difficult to remember, but doesn't give anything away

[pete]

It's also useful to be able to mentally convert $username > fred bloggs in L6h without having to fire up a mmc.

[alan-d]

We use Year joined>Form letter>admission number eg 06N1234

 

As far as email goes they use the exchange server within school and via our web site which they use the search facility to find each other.

[sidewinder]

Ours are done by the LEA and the address is composed of the last 4 digits of a surname, first digit of a first name and a number starting with 001 (002 for the second person with the same name etc)

[Disease]

We do not give the kids email here but if I decided to I would just use their username [email protected].

 

Does not give away sex age or ID, all that is given away is first initial and surname.