Doling out passwords to students

[blackcat]

We set the passwords to their birthdate in the format ddmmyy and force them to change on first login.

[FN-GM]

good idea

[TechMonkey]

We do a mailmerge to give out individual sheets then hand them out when the NM does the first Y7 lesson. This way he can set out the rules, make sure they all can log on with out any problems, can get around the network and can never say that they didn't know the rules/were never told them.

[enjay]

Here, new student accounts are 'password' and are instructed to change this at their first ICT lesson. It's always worked for us in the past.

Same here, and we don't get any problems with people logging in as someone else and changing passwords. But even if we did, it takes seconds to reset it for the affected user, so I wouldn't devote too much time to finding a more secure alternative as the solution might take up more time than the problem!

 

If it did become a bigger problem, I would probably go for middle names or dates of birth - things which are easily extracted from SIMS and won't be known to classmates as early as day 1.

[gnarlyc]

It really surprises me that so many of you do not use more secure passwords. I understand that you have to compromise some, because younger kids do have trouble with passwords... I guess that I have read too many instances of older students who have cracked passwords and changed grades or just messed with people. We have only had a few attempts at these things, as far as I know. I just don't want to be quoted in the newspaper one day saying, "Well, you know the younger kids have trouble remember more complex passwords, so we didn't make them complex. I guess that we will have to change now that we have this issue..." I'm trying to get it through to the staff's heads that you can integrate password creation into learning. You can use their street name and year of birth for instance or even just 'grover-1' is a little harder to crack than '8459'. I'm trying to compromise while still getting a little more security. It's a tough road... We don't really have the funding to add more servers for multiple domains, but even then - I wouldn't be happy with a super simple password complexity requirement.