Student Email Naming Conventions

[Matt Timmerman]

Are there any best practice naming conventions for creating student emails?  We are a high school only district with approximately 7,000 students.

 

[studentidnumber]@d155.org?

[firstintial][lastname][gradyear]@d155.org?

 

We would appreciate any advice from those that have gone before us.

 

Thanks in advace,

 

Matt Timmerman

Instructional Technology Coordinator

Community High School District 155

One South Virginia Road

Crystal Lake, IL  60014

815.455.8500 x1043

 

[Melinda Waffle]

Matt,

The school I worked for previously made it a policy to always have the graduation year in the student ids - this made filtering out the senior class by account name easier when it was time to cycle out accounts.  

We also did not use last names in the accounts as some had concerns about using even that much personal information.  Formats like student id + initials + grad year OR first name + middle & last initials + grade year made it so most teachers could figure out who it was (from within their class list), but outside the organization no personal information was gained.


Melinda Waffle

Educational Technology Consultant

Calhoun Intermediate School District

Marshall, MI
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[Bob Clay, 6196448282]

We use the student number as the email address.  I'd avoid that if I were you.  It makes addressing Email difficult.  Do you really want to have addresses such as 280...@d155.org?

Bob Clay
Director, Technical Services
Grossmont Union High School District

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[Dave Tchozewski]

Our convention is illustrated below:

(year of graduation)(first initial)(last name)@yourschooldistrict.com

By leading with the graduation year, sorting become much easier.

Dave

Dave Tchozewski
Jenison Public Schools
Director of Information Technology

2140 Bauer Road
Jenison, MI 49428

Office (616) 667-3375
Fax (616) 457-8451

dtch...@jpsonline.org
JPS Website
Follow me on Twitter: daveski61

[Marcus L. Twyford]

Great thread....
Thanks for everyone's input.
I was thinking the same question for roll out this summer...

[Joann Poock]

I was planning on using the grad year with my student accounts, but I appreciate your suggestion that it come first.  We're probably going to use (grad yr)(first name)(last name); it will give some kids longer usernames, but it leaves me with only one instance of duplicate usernames to resolve.  When I run our list of 4000 students and use just first initial with the last name, I get A LOT of duplications (even with the grad year to help), many of which still can't be resolved with the inclusion of the middle initial.  Another thing to think about is eliminating spaces, hyphens, and apostrophes in names.  I make Excel do substitutions in those situations.

I've received some feedback that usernames are too long, but if it's the student's name, rather than some more cryptic combination, I figure they ought to be able to deal with it:-)  Finding usernames for so many that work across multiple platforms is no small challenge!

Joann

Joann Poock
Instructional Technology Specialist
West Carrollton Schools, OH

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[Curts, Eric]

Graduation year (or something similar) can be very useful to include somewhere in the username because this allows you to use regular expressions (regex's) to group and match the students in the Google Apps Email Security filtering system.  Currently you cannot create regex's that test for Organizations (such as saying 6th graders can't send email to 7th graders).  However if their usernames follow a clearly definable syntax that includes grad year, then you can use a regex to match them based on that and properly set up filtering rules.

Eric

* Eric Curts

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[HEBDave]

Some general thoughts:

• If you don't include some sort of unique ID number, you'll need to plan for what to do when there are collisions. What happens when there are two RJone...@school.org? Be ready for this, but the likelihood of a problem will depend on your number of students.
• If you include identifying information about your students (name, initials, grad year), you may want to consider FERPA or whatever student data laws might apply. If your students will be expected to use their email addresses on 3rd party services beyond your Google Apps account, and their email address has their full name and graduation year, will that be a privacy problem?
• If you include graduation year, what happens if a student plans to graduate high school early? If a student is held back a year? (Alias email addresses, I'm guessing, but something to consider.)
  
• If the student changes their last name (marriage/divorce of parents), what will you do? (Aliases, but something to consider.)

In our pilot group, we're using [first initial][last initial][student id #]@student.school.org. The username matches the username the students already use to log in to district computers, so it's easier for them. It's just initials, so it reduces the risk of giving out identifying information. We have a unique ID in there so there won't be collisions. We don't have grad year, so we don't have to worry about that data changing. Still might have problems if the student's last name changes.

As far as I can tell, we haven't had any problems with addressing email to students. The teachers have the students' ID numbers and names already and typically have their students email the teacher first thing so they are all in each other's address books. (The teachers aren't using Gmail.)

[Curts, Eric]

p.s. - With all that being said though, when we set up our student accounts last school year, we just used their student ID number (a unique 6 to 7 digit number) followed by "@northcantonschools.org".  This has worked for us because:

• It is unique.
• The students and parents already know the number (they use it for everything, such as buying lunch).
• It looks different from our staff usernames (last name followed by first initial) which helps to avoid confusion between staff and student addresses.

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

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[Bjorn Behrendt]

speaking of naming convention espeically concerns about Using last names.   What did you do for the First Name and Last Name fiels, as they show up when sending a message.   And if you don't use Fname/Lname there how do you easily identify the student?

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[Lydia Shipley]

ALERT: My email has changed to lydia....@bryanisd.org

Just curious...wouldn't this naming convention allow everyone who sees the student email address access to the student IDs? What would prevent one student from using another student's ID to buy a meal?

Lydia Shipley

Technology Services Project Director

Bryan ISD

Email: lydia....@bryanisd.org

Phone: 979-209-7071

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On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Curts, Eric <elc...@northcantonschools.org> wrote:

p.s. - With all that being said though, when we set up our student accounts last school year, we just used their student ID number (a unique 6 to 7 digit number) followed by "@northcantonschools.org".  This has worked for us because:

It is unique.

The students and parents already know the number (they use it for everything, such as buying lunch).

It looks different from our staff usernames (last name followed by first initial) which helps to avoid confusion between staff and student addresses.

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

* (330) 497-5600 x377, FAX (330) 497-5618

*  Google+ Profile - Click here

*  Follow me on Twitter - http://twitter.com/ericcurts

*  Find me on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/ericcurts

* http://www.ericcurts.com

* http://www.northcantonschools.org

* http://www.ohiotreasurechest.org

* http://www.appsusergroup.org

* http://www.thestateoftech.org

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Curts, Eric <elc...@northcantonschools.org> wrote:

Graduation year (or something similar) can be very useful to include somewhere in the username because this allows you to use regular expressions (regex's) to group and match the students in the Google Apps Email Security filtering system.  Currently you cannot create regex's that test for Organizations (such as saying 6th graders can't send email to 7th graders).  However if their usernames follow a clearly definable syntax that includes grad year, then you can use a regex to match them based on that and properly set up filtering rules.

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

* (330) 497-5600 x377, FAX (330) 497-5618

*  Google+ Profile - Click here

*  Follow me on Twitter - http://twitter.com/ericcurts

*  Find me on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/ericcurts

* http://www.ericcurts.com

* http://www.northcantonschools.org

* http://www.ohiotreasurechest.org

* http://www.appsusergroup.org

* http://www.thestateoftech.org

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Marcus L. Twyford <marcus....@gmail.com> wrote:

Great thread....

Thanks for everyone's input.

I was thinking the same question for roll out this summer...

On Apr 20, 2012 12:35 PM, "Dave Tchozewski" <dtch...@jpsonline.org> wrote:

Our convention is illustrated below:

(year of graduation)(first initial)(last name)@yourschooldistrict.com

By leading with the graduation year, sorting become much easier.

Dave

Dave Tchozewski

Jenison Public Schools

Director of Information Technology

2140 Bauer Road

Jenison, MI 49428

Office (616) 667-3375

Fax (616) 457-8451

dtch...@jpsonline.org

JPS Website

Follow me on Twitter: daveski61

[Sheri Edwards]

Hello all.

From a very small school (31 students in grades 6 7 8), we don't use student names.

The students create pseudonym from the letters in their names.

So  Kevin Bacon might choose any of these "code" ( four-plus letters ) names:

keon

vinba

vincon

bavin

Then the year they graduate from high school reversed is added.  So if Keven would graduate in 2016 and he chose vinba as his name, his email user name would be

vin...@domainname.org

We like it. The kids like it. And their name is confidential.

Sheri

sh...@nsdeagles.org
Teacher and Technology Director

Sheri Edwards

Nespelem School

Box 291 School Loop Road

Nespelem, WA 99155

509 634 4541

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[Kevin Johnson]

We wanted student usernames to be:

• consistently as short as possible (in our case never longer than 11 characters)
• unique across the district
• sortable/searchable by last name first
• readable by someone without having to look up an id or something
• constructable by a student using parts they know (so someone doesn't need to tell them their user name)

Our convention is first four letters of last name + . + first four letters of first name + birthdate. So for example, if my name is James McCarthy and I was born on Sept 6th, my user name would be mcca.jame6 

Once in a while I can see where it would be nice to have grad year too but not very often and wanted to keep the name as short as possible. While there is the slight possibility of duplicates with this algorithm, we haven't had any yet and we would easily assign a student something like 32 for the birthdate.

Kevin

[Curts, Eric]

For the first name field we put in "Student" and for the last name field we put in both their first and last name, so a student would display as "Student John Smith".  This gives one more visual cue to our staff, to help them distinguish between students and staff when sending email or sharing documents.

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

* (330) 497-5600 x377, FAX (330) 497-5618

*  Google+ Profile - Click here

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[Curts, Eric]

Our lunch system screen displays the student picture associated with the ID the student keys in, so the cashier can see who the ID belongs to.  Plus the lunch clerks get to know the kids pretty quick.

Eric

* Eric Curts

* Technology Director, North Canton City Schools

* 525 - 7th St NE, North Canton, OH 44720

* te...@northcantonschools.org

* (330) 497-5600 x377, FAX (330) 497-5618

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