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Sign Me Up! The Elementary Email Solution: Linked Gmail Accounts

One of my biggest stumbling blocks as I’ve switched gears from middle to elementary school is individual e-mail accounts for the students. Back in middle school, I could always count on every student having their own e-mail account. Even if, for some strange reason, one or two students didn’t have one, I could just ask them to sign up for one before the next class and it would be done. Alas, nothing is quite that easy at the elementary level….

In our case, for lower elementary students, we really only need each student to have an individual, permanent, e-mail address to sign up for other services (not to actually send and receive e-mail). So, in order to get our second grade class up and running with Ning accounts for our Global Village project (which, of course, require a consistent e-mail address for log in purposes - no mailenator for us), and in preparation for all of our Global Communication Center projects, I spent less than an hour today solving my problem, thanks to Gmail.

Basically, Gmail allows you to create subsidiary accounts linked to an individual Gmail account. Check out this great screencast demonstrating how to create linked Gmail accounts that Alec Courosa made with Jing earlier today (I need to start getting the kids to make screencasts with Jing next - what a great way to create tutorials!).

Basically, this means that one teacher can have 20 permanent e-mail accounts that are all delivered into one teacher e-mail account. Therefore, if the teacher account is teacher@gmail.com, all you have to do is add a “+studentname” before the @ symbol to make a linked account. Therefore mail sent to teacher+studentname@gmail.com will go straight to teacher@gmail.com. Of course, given that Gmail terms and conditions require users to be over 18, we did send out a permission slip to all parents to get their formal approval that we create these linked accounts.