Day 19: Username Troubleshooting

On my last day in February, the school was starting to distribute Chromebooks to all of the second grade classes. This week, the students were beginning to log in with their own usernames and passwords provided them by the district. Each of their usernames was generated by writing their whole first and last names together. Their passwords were generated:
1. first and last initial
2. lunch number (tied to SSN)
3. "SDOC" (School District of Oconee County)

This is extremely secure! This will protect the students' information! This will be nigh impossible for second graders to remember and type!

One of the teachers, Mrs. Guill, was logging in her computers to do the Destiny catalog lesson with Mrs. Edgerton. She sent a student down as a cry for help getting these kids to log on. When I went down there and tried the username and password on the computer, it had zero problem. When I had students type in the information, I had lots of problems.

The biggest problem was that the usernames and passwords were being typed incorrectly. The students have not yet developed their typing skills (still one-finger typists) so struggled with the lengthy passwords that were taking longer than the teacher expected. Even then, the usernames/passwords they typed often had mistakes of mis-keys and of wrong spelling. Especially the students with long last names spelled their own names incorrectly (as the teachers don't require last names written on classwork). One girl even had a hyphen in her name! How do you expect 7-year-olds to know all those nuances! Then came the problem of students that do not go by their legal first name. One student just could not understand why he couldn't change the username to the name he wanted to be called.

I normally spend my time with high schoolers who better understand the principles of their pre-generated school emails, but who still mis-key or fail to follow directions at sign in. These usernames and passwords must be secure and complex, but are also not best suited to the populations of school aged kids. This is the conundrum of the personalized accounts.

Technology has two sides: the benefits of assessment, access, practicality, diversity and the issues of troubleshooting, internet connectivity, user error.

Perhaps students as young as second grade don't require their own profiles for the county system. The students are not turning in major assignments like papers and projects digitally; they are not logging into the district programs for email or testing. There are other programs the students log into that are not affiliated with the county-generated account (i.e. PebbleGo, MAP testing, schoology, etc). As the district moves forward, I see the profiles being entered at an age above seven. Both for realistic purposes and to save the district money on profiles!