This beginning of this post is specific for users of Powerschool SMS.
I’ve entertained using various educational programs and apps in my class in order to increase student learning and engagement. Several of these tools involved teachers signing up students for accounts. The thought of individually inputting 180+ student usernames, emails, passwords, etc. was daunting, so I usually tabled the idea until I could figure “something” out.
This year I was particularly motivated to find a solution because my interdisciplinary team wanted to have our students blog using Edublogs. In order to create student users, Edublogs requires them to have a username, email, and password. We wanted something consistent and easy to remember for the students. I was desperate for a way to streamline the process without having to ask anyone in our IT department how to do it, so I hunkered down one evening and began my quest.
I knew that I could easily create accounts if I could download all of our students’ emails into a Comma-separated Excel file. It seemed that neither Jupitergrades LMS or Powerschool SMS (the programs my school employs) allowed me to do that.
Until one day, I clicked on everything clickable in both programs and found the solution in Powerschool. And voila! I was on my way to creating student accounts!
DOWNLOADING STUDENT EMAILS FROM POWERSCHOOL
After logging into Powerschool, click on Admin>User Settings
Click on the Reports tab, scroll down, and select Student Email. Next, click on Apply.
You will see a new Report Name called “Student Email.”
Next, go to My Reporst>Student Email.
A small window will pop up. Select Comma-separated values (*.csv), and then Run. After a couple of minutes, your file will download.
When you open the file, you’ll have all of their student names, IDs, and emails.
CREATING LOGIN INFORMATION FROM THIS EXCEL SPREADSHEET
First, delete all of the columns that do not contain student names, IDs, and emails.
Copy the email column and paste it in the next column. Keep the second column highlighted.
On the Toolbar, click on Data>Text to Columns. A little window will pop up. Select Delimited>Next.
For the delimiters, select Other and type in the @ sign beside it. This will split everything before and after that sign. Finally, select Finish.
You’ll end up with all of your information nicely separated.
I was definitely relieved to figure out this workaround. After completing this, I split up the students into four groups so that each of us on the team could create new student users for the blog. It made it very easy to just copy and paste the information into Edublogs.
I’m sure others have found an easier way to create student accounts. If you have, please leave a comment below!
We haven’t quite started blogging with our classes just yet, but we should up and running in the next couple of weeks. Keep your eye out for it at flags8.org.