Username format

[kestrel1]

Just wondering how everyone else formats their usernames for students.

I am looking for a new format, but cannot decide what to use.

We currently do the following:

Say you have a student John Doe with an intake year of 2012, I take the first letter of the surname & forename then add 12, so it would look like:

DJ12

This works, but I think something along the line of:

J.Doe12

might be better. I also wonder if restricting the amount of letters used for the surname might be an idea as well.

So if you have a student with a surname of Smith-Jones you could use 8 characters so John Smith-Jones would be:

J.Smith-Jo12

What do you think & what do you use.

[rush_tech]

year of intake - form - surname - first initial

 

12DSmithC

 

Kind of similar to your suggestion, we just remove the hypen form double barreled names

Edited June 25, 2012 by rush_tech

[themightymrp]

Year of entry, surname, first initial:

 

12SmithJ

 

Any duplicates use 2 letters from first name:

 

12SmithJa

 

Any hyphenated names, just remove the hyphen. Likewise for apostrophies

 

12ObrienC

[Davit2005]

I'd use the same format as their email address if they have a school provided email address.

 

We used Intake year then first inital surname 12fsurname, we only had 1 or 2 conflicting name issues out of 1100 student user accounts :-).

[glennda]

I used to use intake year initial surname so 10jblogss etc

 

staff was just initialsurname so jbloggs

[tomgrindle]

Year of entry - First 5 letters of surname - First 3 letters of first name

 

12grindtho

[K.C.Leblanc]

Year of entry, surname, first initial:

 

12SmithJ

 

Any duplicates use 2 letters from first name:

 

12SmithJa

 

Any hyphenated names, just remove the hyphen. Likewise for apostrophies

 

12ObrienC

 

Pretty much the same, although when we get duplicates we tend to use a middle initial if there is one.

[themightymrp]

The school I attended (not where I work) used to use the number of the tutor group, then the year of entry, dot, surname, underscore, first initial. For example, if someone was in form 6 of the 1993 entries:

 

693.smith_c

 

or in my current workplace:

 

DA12.Smith_C

 

A bit more complex but less conflicts

[timbo343]

Date of year start followed by firstname.surname. Ie, if they started in 2011 it would be 11jonny.briggs therefore preventing duplicates in the year. We found that having just firstname.surname have duplicates throughout the school and surnameFirstTwoLettersOfFirstName gave far too many duplicates. Seems to be working well at the moment.

 

Staff have surnameFirstTwoLettersOfFirstName though.

[K.C.Leblanc]

I visited a seminar once where someone suggested using a student's UPN!!!

[twin--turbo]

we used to have the year of entry, but management decided to get rid of it???

 

You need something fairly long to avoid duplicates. We still get tehm even with firstname.lastname

 

Rob

[6Foot2]

Year of entry, surname, first initial:

 

12SmithJ

 

Any duplicates use 2 letters from first name:

 

12SmithJa

 

Any hyphenated names, just remove the hyphen. Likewise for apostrophies

 

12ObrienC

 

Same here.

[kestrel1]

You think they would remember the UPN?

Ours have problems with the very short username that we use currently.

Got some ideas here though.

[daveyboy]

Year of intake, first 4 of surname & first 2 of first name - i.e. 12SmitJo (John Smith)

 

If we have two the same or a Jake & James, then we use the middle initial - i.e. 12SmitJt & 12SmitJr

[sonofsanta]

Ours is initialSurnameEntryyear e.g. jbloggs11 for Joanne Bloggs in the current year 7. I'd prefer it to be 11jbloggs to make it easier to order lists by, but I'm loathe to switch halfway through and watch it be a mess for 7 years. It works well enough.

 

Clashes are infrequent but usually resolved by using the middle initial e.g. JABloggs11 for Joanne Anne Bloggs.

 

It's worth keeping initial.surname as a minimum as it actually provides information to you and to teachers rather than just being a unique string. 11jb11, as it would have been at my last place, is not much use to any one, whereas initial.surname often tells a teacher at a glance who is on the computer playing games when they see it on LanSchool.

[HarryMonkey]

Surname first initial dot last two of year of entry so, ... DoeJ.12

[Disease]

We just use first initial Surname : - FSurname. If we get a dupe we just add a middle initial, FDSurname.

[januttall]

We use SirnameFS12

Sirname Firstname Secondname intake year

[BooBoo]

2 digit year of entry, full surname, first 3 digits of christian name. We remove all hyphens. We adopted this from the librarians at the school who said most in the county used something similar.

eg: 12smithjam

[danbuntu]

We are a college - 16+ - and use that the student unqiue learner number - which is an 8 digit number, the first two digits being the year of intake.

 

As for students remembering it we have the advantage of all students having to carry an id badge whilst on site and we print the student number on their id badge. Given that they need to type it in in order to can access to college pcs/ moodle they soon learn it!

 

The massive advantage of using the id number is that AD/ MIS/ Moodle and all of our other systems are a lot easier to tie together. Makes for much simpler system integration and we've had no complaints from the students.

[hit]

We use the USO (unified sign-on) from Atomwide/LGfL. Makes it nice and easy for them to only have one set of credentials for the school and all the LGfL/Fronter/LondonMail services. We have to make password changes in two places which could be simplified by paying for USO/ADSync but I'm tight and we don't have to do that many changes.

[liamvaughan]

Just wondering how everyone else formats their usernames for students.

I am looking for a new format, but cannot decide what to use.

We currently do the following:

Say you have a student John Doe with an intake year of 2012, I take the first letter of the surname & forename then add 12, so it would look like:

DJ12

This works, but I think something along the line of:

J.Doe12

might be better. I also wonder if restricting the amount of letters used for the surname might be an idea as well.

So if you have a student with a surname of Smith-Jones you could use 8 characters so John Smith-Jones would be:

J.Smith-Jo12

What do you think & what do you use.

 

 

we use the first letter of their name and then surname followed by the year of intake for example

 

John Smith who started in 2012 would be jsmith12 we also usually ignore hyphens and any other symbols also if we have a duplicate we just use there first 2 letters so we would have jmsith12 and josmith12

[laserblazer]

The High School our kids move to use intake year, surname, first initial of firstname 12BloggsJ. So we do the same but give them the year they leave. That way, they keep the same username at the High School.

[Meldrew]

Interesting that everyone seems to use students names in some fashion. We were told by CLT that we were not allowed to use names at all as their email address is [email protected] and we aren't allowed to have students identifiable by their email address for child protection purposes. We use: Year of entry, tutor and admission number, eg 12ABC1234.

[kestrel1]

Good point, not something I had thought about.

Might have to rethink this then.