Student Accounts?

 What I do is so simple you could call it naive, but it has worked well for several years for my 2nd-6th graders.  We use each student's first name followed by a fake short last name similar to our school name.  So if you teach at George Washington Elementary School, your students could be BettyWash, RobertWash, etc.  I also compounded three simple but unrelated words to make a ten-character password that is easy to remember.  I encourage students not to change the password so that I can access their account if I need to, but I don't insist on that.

So far, there have not been any real problems doing that. especially with Scratch 2.0 . I suppose that students could hack one another's accounts and disrupt things in other ways, but it has not happened and I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.  Meanwhile, life is easy doing this.

When we first started doing Scratch, some parents did express some concerns.  That was a bit tense, but I ended up making up a permission slip and giving each parent and child the option of opting out or just using special one-time accounts within the classroom.  However, at that point, all of the parents gave permission to do things as I had outlined and we've just gone on from there.

I think the really big factor that makes this work is the amount of thought and effort the Scratch team has done to make this a safe constructive environment for kids.  The recent additions to make sure credit is given for remixing projects is just one more step in that directions.  Kudos.

Bruce