Starting Again, with Experience This Time!

Had some Blogger issues during some previous post attempts, so I am going to try to journal again this year with our successes and challenges in Going Google at VVMS.

School has started. Yippee!!!

We decided this year to change our naming formula for student accounts, and that will make managing accounts easier for me. Students will have their promotion from middle school year precede their names. Thus, Joe Blow, an 8th grader, will be 13_JoeBlow@vvms.org. I remind you here that we don't have e-mail for students yet. I plan to make this request, but want to be a bit further down the road before I start working with the district on that one.

I created the form again this year that had students fill in their first and last names and student numbers. I had some other fields on the form, but realized that I could have Google Spreadsheets do at least some of the work for me.

The challenge with the spreadsheet was to type less and have fewer student errors (you wouldn't believe how often they misspell their own names). The form data simply asked for student number (A1), first name (A2), last name (A3), and grade level (A4).

To create the user name, I wanted the spreadsheet to look at the grade level and automatically fill into another cell the year of promotion, something of an if-then statement. If A4=8, then A5=13_. If A4=7, then A5=14_. Get the idea? I couldn't figure out how to make that happen, so I manually filled in the promotion year into A5.

To create the user name in A6, I used the formula =A5&A2&A3, which created 13_Joe Blow.

I also wanted to add a fixed text value ("vv") to the student number from A1 to create the password, but couldn't figure out how to do that either. So I simply added the vv text into A7, and into A8 typed the formula =A7&A8. 

All of this I copied and pasted into another spreadsheet, simplified the columns to include first, last, username, and password, and saved as a csv file. I uploaded it and created all the student accounts.

I would like to do a few things next. I would like to transfer student work from the old account to the new account, and I saw today how I could do that manually. I would then be able to delete all the old student accounts without the current naming in place.

I would like to have a spreadsheet of accounts I've created. Since I've had to manually create and add accounts as well, I would like to be able to download and save a whole list of the "final" ones. It would be much easier to have that accessible rather than go through 30 names at a time online, looking for the correct account to reset or even to create if it hadn't been created.

There are the basics of getting my accounts set up. So far, Google has approved every request for additional accounts, so I am up to 400 now. I do need to delete last year's 8th graders, and will do so soon.