foolfillment: the blog

As well as the Anomoto app for the iPhone, another piece of good news that came out over Christmas was the move by wikispaces to enable teachers to create accounts for their students.

Anyone with a K12 account can now very easily set up a user name, email address, and password for each and every one of their students. Previously anybody who wanted to use the service had to have an active email address already. This was a major problem for me when I tried to use wikispaces last term with my S1 class only to find they hadn’t been given their user names or passwords yet (this was 4 months after they joined the school!).

This evening I spent about 15 minutes creating accounts for all of the new S1s that I will get from now until June. The process was dead simple, all I needed to provide was a user name. Wikispaces then created the email address based on the wiispaces.com domain and even created a password. I’ve opted to create a user name based upon the pupils’ names prefixed with an abbreviation of the school’s name and the year that they started there - hopefully this should mean I can set up new accounts each year with no problem.

There is also the option to input your own existing passwords. Of course, had I known the format of their existing user names for the school network and a copy of their passwords I could have set up these accounts to match and save confusion. In future this is definitely what I will try to do.

Tags: account creation, school, wikispaces

This entry was posted at 7:56 pm on the 4th of January, 2009 and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.