Work-Around for E-mail Addresses for Elementary School Students
If you are working with elementary school students you are familiar with the issue of needing an e-mail address for each one of your students to sign up for certain web based services and tools.
Kim Cofino in Bangkok is also running into these problem as she is trying to set her students up with Yack Pack accounts.
I am planning on working around this issue by signing them up with a "fake" e-mail account from our school domain. Since I am the webmaster, I also receive all "catchall" e-mails from this domain. Any e-mail that is not set up as a POP3 account and "technically" does not exist comes to that catchall account, if someone is sending a mail to that specific address.
This worked well last summer, when I created a WordPress blog for each of my tech campers. For our Egypt Blog, I also created over 50 users for our 6th Grade students, so they could log in with a username and password to comment on the blog.
I also receive any notification if students want to change passwords or someone were to try to contact them through the e-mail, I would get the e-mail delivered to the catchall account.
I am thinking that it would be possible for any teachers to purchase any domain name (maybe named appropriately according to the teacher’s class). Once you own the domain, you own all the unlimited possibilities of e-mails before the "@yourdomain.com". You will just need to find a mail host, which I believe most domain name sellers offer as a package deal.
Just don’t set them up as POP accounts and the catchall account will catch them and sent them directly to you.
Very interested in hearing any other teacher’s work-around of this issue with younger students.
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September 24th, 2007 at 12:45 am
This is how I’ve dealt with signing up for Web 2.0 applications for high school students:
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/05/18/temporary-student-email-addresses/
September 24th, 2007 at 5:12 am
An interesting solution, Silvia!
Unfortunately our tech department is huge and I am, by no means, in charge of anything related the backend of our network…
So, I think I’m going to do the multiple e-mails under one gmail account that I’ve seen other teachers do in the past. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only thing I can think of. I’m hoping that each teacher will manage the e-mails for his/her individual class because there is no way I can manage all 700 email accounts for every elementary student at our school…
Next on the agenda: get the school to give the students e-mail accounts. Duh. When I was teaching in Munich from 2000 - 2005 every student had an e-mail account provided by the school. Because of that experience, I have come to expect school-provided e-mail accounts for students and still find myself shocked when the kids don’t have them. One step at a time, though…
September 24th, 2007 at 5:30 am
Kim,
I was not aware that you could have multiple e-mails under one gmail account.
I goggled the solution and found that by simply adding a “plus sign” after your username and before the “@gmail.com” that would be delivered directly to your account.
ex. “langwitches+123[at] gmail dot com”
How cool is that?
September 24th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Well we learn something new every day!
A very cool trick!