Hi all,
One of the general struggles people have with technology is how to come up with and remember passwords for all the many accounts they have online. We've all be told not to use anything obvious, anything connected to our lives that other people might know (the name of a pet for example). When creating a password for an online site there are often rules like you need to include at least one capital letter and a number. Sometimes you need to include a non alphanumeric symbol and sometimes you cannot use one. Sometimes the password must be at least 8 characters long, sometimes at least 14 characters long, sometimes exactly 6 characters long. So any system you come up with is always going to end up falling outside some set of rules somewhere, sometime.
From the research I've done the best solution is to use a password vault (what's that?) of some sort that will create and remember random passwords for you, so the only password you have to create and remember is the one to the password vault. But which password vault? And will it work across all my devices? I tried Dashlane but it was cumbersome on my phone and I gave up.
I just came across an article on the move to get away from the password Passwords Are Terrible -- And These Companies Want To Kill Them which is interesting although still feels far away from now. What do you do about passwords? How do you handle passwords when using accounts with students?
Here is another interesting article on Four Methods to Create a Secure Password You'll Actually Remember.
best,
Nell
Comments
Here's what I do for password creation for students new to the digital world: I use a formula to generate a password for every student that is easy for me to remember in case I have to help them rescue their account, but which is not easy to guess. Generally, it's been some combination of the academic year, the student's name or initials, * or ! or @, and one piece of other numeric information (birthday, street address, etc.)
So, my student "Jose Garcia Vasquez," who lives at 1234 Main Street might be 15JgV@1234!
The formula is long enough and includes enough variables that it satisfies most requirements for passwords.
Once students are proficient, I suggest using some formula for different passwords for different websites.
For example, if Jose wants to go onto USA Learns/Class, I might suggest 15jgv@USA*.
I have found this completely eliminated the problem of "I forgot my password" as well as the risk for someone finding a written list of my students' passwords (which I used to keep before I went to this system several years ago).
I also encourage students to change their passwords only after they have successfully logged in without assistance three times.
I hope that helps!
Glenda
sjr
Hi Nel,
Thanks for raising this topic, a challenge for all of us. I use a vault, and I still try to change important passwords in the vault at least annually.
Duren, great suggestion for creating student passwords.
I would love hear what others do too.
David J. Rosen
Djrosen123@gmail.comr
I can't speak much to the "Passwords in the Classroom" discussion, but I CAN share my frustrations with passwords. I asked for a Password Fingerprint Manager for Christmas one year from my daughter and really liked it. It's a USB device, like this:
You have to set it up on each computer,laptop, etc that you use passwords on.. and then enter the password once.
I have to say I really liked at first, but then just got tired of having to tote it around everywhere I went. So now I have a 5x7 index card that I keep all my passwords on. It's ridiculously unsafe, I know.. but until I find a better way, this is all I have. :-(
Deb