I'm a teacher. How can I get my students logged into a wiki when they don't have e-mail addresses?

That's a really nifty trick. I thought I knew everything about Gmail, but apparently I have much to learn! I might use that trick when I have to sign up to read things online. Then I'll know who's spamming me.

As a teacher if I sign up students for google mail or any other system that can be spammed, I'd hate to be the person responsible for any inappropriate materials that arrive in their teacher provided email accounts. If you still want to provide emails for your students there are more secure alternatives. I don't use this, but I've read some good reviews. www.gaggle.net, it promises "safe email for students." I'd love to hear what you think about it. :)

Roberto

If you need a little help with Paul's suggestion to use the "+" feature in Gmail. I've got an FAQ with detailed info here:
http://help4all.pbwiki.com/AddingMult...

I don't have a GMail account but will look over the suggested naming convention. This might work if the account can only be used by me.
Anyone see any problem in this? Do I have to put time in every afternoon and evening monitoring that account for the kids to accomplish day-to-day activities on the wiki?

As a public school fifth grade teacher in a semi-rural community with less than 1/8th of my students having access to a computer -- and certainly even fewer students with their own e-mail -- if I set up a independently-usable e-mail account for a student without a carefully worded signed letter from the guardian/parent, I'd run the risk of serious reprimand. Parents are scared of this for their kids. My Principal is already worried about my having a wiki at all.

Any way to use IDs in systems like Moodle? We don't use that yet so I don't know tech details for their servers, messaging protocols, etc.

If you’ve ever done a workshop that requires teachers (or students) to use GOOGLE, you know how chaotic things get because most teachers come into the workshops without Google Accounts. And you lose valuable class time setting them up.

Even if you create a “public wiki,” the new PB wiki now models a behavior similar to Google. The moment workshop participants try to edit a page, it throws everyone onto a page that requires them to log in or create an account.

But the wise people at PB Wiki left a work-around that saves the day!!!!

It’s called MAGIC URL. If you go into wiki settings and click on “SHARING”, you will see a very long URL. I took that URL and converted it to TINY URL. Then, I pasted it on the opening page of my workshop wiki.

When it came time for teams to write on the wiki, I simply had them click on that URL. It gave them immediate access without ever having to create a PB Wiki account.

This tip could save your day!

Remember, however, this will leave no paper trail on who did the editing. So it's best used when participants will only have one-time use.

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Bonus Tip:

I create a lot of wiki "templates" for my workshops. Each team is assigned a page that they can write on. They can also click through the other team pages to see how others have responded. If I want to give the same workshop a month from now to an entirely different group, I simply revert to the last revision I made before the workshop started. And in an instant, I get a clean slate!

Anne

Please keep in mind that MANY schools and districts block their students (and sometimes teachers) from accessing email accounts like yahoo, hotmail, and gmail. Students do not have access to email accounts at all where I teach, nor are there plans to allow this anytime soon (actually are considering tighter restrictions).

My school has used Gaggle for the last 3 years and we love it. The e-mail gets filtered for inappropriate language (although all of the "acid" rain projects got filtered. They also have pornography filters and digital lockers and blogs. Teachers have access to their students files.

I have the same problem. Our students do not have email addresses. Our school does not issue student email.
I would really like to have the ability to add students with a user name.

Thanks for adding your comment TechTeach. We will be working on features that will make adding students much easier. I can't promise you when this will be available, but you can keep an eye on our blog for announcements.
http://blog.pbwiki.com

Hi WillDoane,

The discussion above is not about us denying anyone access to PBwiki if they don't have an email address. It's about the requirements for using v2.0 of PBwiki.

PBwiki has been offering our free wiki hosting services to educators and non-profit organizations for nearly 3 years now. Hundreds if not thousands of educators and students use PBwiki every day.

We are sensitive to the email issue. In fact, you can still create a v1.0 wiki that allows students and teachers to log in without using any email other than the one email address required of the wiki owner.

Our requirements for teachers using PBwiki have not changed. Only access to 2.0 wikis requires everyone to use email. The 2.0 wikis needed to have stricter security options that 1.0 could not offer.

Students using PBwiki 1.0 can log in using the wiki invite key, any email address and their name.

Let me clarify the email address at login I just told you about. Any email address that you enter will work when logging into a v1.0 wiki. It does not have to be a real email address. I believe in many cases, the teacher assigns a standard email address for the students to enter into the login page. Whether or not it's an address that truly exists is up to the teacher. Only a wiki owner needs to have a real email address.

There is no work around needed to invite students to a PBwiki 1.0 wiki. Simply share the wiki Invite Key with them and tell them where and how to log in.

Creating a 1.0 wiki is essentially unchanged and only requires that you use your email address for verification and uncheck a single check box at step 3. Go to http://pbwiki.com to get a free wiki so that you can see for yourself that we still continue to offer a great free service.

If you need help or advice on using PBwiki for classrooms, please visit our Educators wiki at http://educators.pbwiki.com.

Is there anything else you need clarification on?

Just to update everyone on this thread - we realize 2.0 isn't working well for educators when their students don't have email addresses. Which is exactly why we're working on a new log in solution specifically for educators. We LOVE our educator users, and we want to make absolute certain we have the best solution coming out. So please be patient, it's coming!

Rachel, Will this login solution be usable before the new academic year begins? I want my students to be able to edit without a separate email address. Could this be a login unique only to an individual teacher? I am still very new to wikis, so I am learning. I may try Gaggle.

Rachel,
I read in Krissy's blog that there was an idea now of how to do this in V2, but haven't seen the answer posted. Any update on the progress. I prefer PB Wiki V2 to wikispaces but for now am still locked in to wikispaces in my classroom because of the email issue.

I would suggest a variation of this. If you signup with IDs with your name and then sutudent1... up to say 25. Then you can reuse these from year to year. Just make cards with name and password to give to the students. Keep them in a spreadsheet for easy reference and add the names for that year.

example: esempiostudent1 or esempio2 etc.

Use spreadsheet at http://www.google.com to always have it on hand. You can display it on screen for students as well to see their assinged names.

Has anything been decided on students access to pbwiki w/out email addresses? I would like to set up my students soon. Also, an option at wikispaces for adding an entire class is to send wikispaces a list of all students with username (optional email) and password. That makes it very easy to add students. Anything that easy on pbwiki at this time?

I set up epals.com free email accounts for all my students last year (2nd grade) and I see all incoming/outgoing messages - but you can just flag certain words or emails with attachments. I hope to work collaboratively on our wiki with pen pals in Portugal and Italy this year. Adding email addresses does create a little more work for the teacher, but it is a great learning tool in itself.

I have students use my school email address to log-in to the wiki. That way, there is no excuse of no email. Also, it guarantees that editing emails are sent to the teacher. Also, students and parents don't like receiving editing emails at home!

On a similar note, I work with Adult Basic Education & Adult English Language programs and these groups also have a big problem with signing students up with email. Their problem is not that students can't access email, but rather that turnover in the class is so frequent (like you might get 5 new students a week) that any teacher who wants to work on technologies like wikis, blogs, etc. is stuck teaching several new people each week how to get and use email before he/she can do the main lesson. It's a pain.

Several teachers I know use a system of creating a single "student" login with a free "student" email (e.g. susie[dot]student[at]yahoo[dot]com) and then allow every student who doesn't already have their own email to use that one account to login to the blog, wiki, etc.

I don't know anyone who's tried this with PBwiki yet. Is it possible for multiple people to be logged on to PBwiki at the same time with the same acccount? If so, this work-around could be a good solution. The only major drawback is that everyone's work is attributed to "susie student". Teachers generally just ask that students sign their work so that they know who did what.

Love the tip about gmail+name, above, tho... I'm going to have to explore that one!

Hillary asked if she needed to create an email account at Gmail for each student.

The answer is no.

You only need one Gmail account. As stated above, you can use a variation of the single Gmail address for each student and all of the addresses will still belong to the single Gmail account.

You: ImATeacher@gmail.com
Student1: ImATeacher+student1@gmail.com
Student2: ImATeacher+student2@gmail.com
StudnetN: ImATeacher+studentN@gmail.com

Even though those addresses are each unique enough to qualify as different people to us, they are the same account at Gmail and any email written to those addresses will all appear in the same Inbox at Gmail.

You can create an almost infinite number of unique addresses at Gmail by simply adding the plus (+) symbol and text after it. The real account name is the text before the plus symbol.

Susan WB asked: Is it possible for multiple people to be logged on to PBwiki at the same time with the same acccount?

I'm pretty sure that you could do this. However, you may run into occasional problems with the wiki. The best solution would be to use that single Gmail account and have the student create a new PBwiki Account using that address with the plus symbol and their name after it.

They can go to http://my.pbwiki.com to create the PBwiki Account and then they can visit your wiki to request access. See this page for more details on the request.
http://newfaq20.pbwiki.com/Request-Ac...

The ideas for creating email accounts for the students are fantastic! However, my school board (as well as many others) blocks all outside email. This means no access to gmail, gaggle, yahoo mail, etc. for staff or students. The web1 PBwiki version worked with an invite key. My question is, will there be an alternative login method for students who have NO access to an email address due to blocking decisions at the Board level?

Hillary asked: Thanks Clif! I may sound a bit challenged...but can you tell me in detail how I go about doing that since when I tried to create another Gmail account using the ImaTeacher+ technique, it tells me that it won't accept the + symbol in the username. Thanks for your patience.

Hi Hillary. As mentioned already, you don't need to create more than one Gmail account. What you will be doing is asking the students to create their own PBwiki Account using your email address.

If your Gmail address is bluegreen@gmail.com then your students will go to http://my.pbwiki.com and click on "Sign up" as shown here.



They will use your email address with some additional text that identifies them to you. Here are some suggestions:

Mark will sign up as bluegreen+mark@gmail.com
Jenny will sign up as bluegreen+jenny@gmail.com
and so on ...

Gmail interprets all the addresses with a + sign as the same address. Therefore, all of the students will be receiving the verification emails in your Gmail account.

When you receive the verification emails, just follow the instructions to complete each student's PBwiki Account sign up.

After each student has their PBwiki Account set up, they can log into their PBwiki Accounts at my.pbwiki.com and use that specific email address to log in.

Mark will login as bluegreen+mark@gmail.com and use his password
Jenny will login as bluegreen+jenny@gmail.com and use her password
and so on ...

At this point, each student can log into their PBwiki Account and each will have their own email address (it's actually your email bluegreen@gmail.com address). They will each also have their own password that you do not know.

Once the students log in, they should each visit your wiki and they will see a message telling them that they don't have access. They will also see a message telling them that they can Request Access if you have enabled this.
http://newfaq20.pbwiki.com/Request-Ac...

The above instructions are for a classroom that needs to use our PBwiki 2.0 wikis. Please keep in mind that we will soon have an easier way to share these. I don't know the details yet but you will not need email addresses for students.

Also keep in mind that you can always create a PBwiki 1.0 wiki. It only requires an invite key to gain entrance. It does ask for an email address, but any email address will work and you can simply make up a fictional address or use the teacher's address.

To create a 1.0 wiki, just go to http://pbwiki.com and be sure to clear the 2.0 check box when it asks you what kind of wiki you want.

Is it necessary to use a gmail adres, or can emailadresses by all providers be used? I mean to create a class list of similar emailadresses to use to work with wikis.

I created myself a new gmail account and listed a couple of student names using the trick of my adress + studentname@gmail.com. A new problem I faced is: I tried to lock a page so that only the administrator (I) could change my instructions. It failed to work. Playing with my new student logins I was able to "steal the lock" or could simply edit the page while I was logged in as a student. It seemed to me that I couldn't save my option to lock the page. Can you help me out here?

Hi Irene,

Based on what you've told me, my guess is that there is actually nothing wrong. There are possible problems that you may not be aware of when you try to log in as someone else with a different Access Level. In order to help you more, I'll need private information from you. I don't want you to post it here.

Please contact us directly via email and tell us the same details you have here. Be sure to include the wiki name and the details such as the student accounts you tried to simulate.