We anticipated that the new policy may cause a few hiccups during the registration period. We have created a few procedures to help you navigate through the registration period with ease in our Teacher Registration Planning Guide.
Based on the significant changes we made to student registration this year, we STRONGLY recommend that you spend a few minutes doing some registration planning BEFORE students start registering.
What is the big change? We will no longer ask for the student’s name during registration. We decided to make a bold move to protect students’ privacy and data this year and the best way to do this is to never put students at risk. The Budget Challenge database and all employees will no longer know which student is which, and more importantly, neither will anyone else, even if there is a data breach.
This may seem confusing–How will teachers be able to identify which student is which?
The easiest way to know who your students are is to ask each student to add a prefix to his/her username. This is what we are calling registration planning. There are many ways to do this, here are a couple of examples.
Creating usernames that make sense INSIDE the classroom but not OUTSIDE:
1) Look at the numerical order of students in your gradebook and ask that each student leads off their username with that number. Example: Amy Abbott (1st in the gradebook) should start her username with a 1 or 1- or 1_ (1gocardinals, 1-directionfan, 1_CC555z etc.) Similarly, Amit Salzar (15th in the gradebook) should start his username with 15 (15chickenman, 15_chickenwing7, 15-cake4ever etc.)
2) Instruct students to use the first two initials of first name and first two initials of last name. So Caden Smith might have the username CaSmGoPackers, or casm7767, etc. Reversing the order of this code to will also work (SmCaGoPackers) will also work. The important thing is that only the teacher knows the significance of the number or letter combinations.
Also note when you are creating your class you will have the option to allow students to use an email address when registering. If you choose to allow students to register with an email address students must provide the email when creating their accounts.
Ok, let’s say that the teacher does registration planning and you end up with some usernames that didn’t follow the plan. What now? How will the teacher know who these students are?
We’ve added a couple of new features to help with this possible scenario.
1) We have the (Username Identifier Sheet) that contains a list of all usernames in a class. Next to each username is a blank space for students to write down their name. This list can easily be printed out and passed around the class. The sheet can be found on TeacherHome>Registration. You will need to choose the class you wish to view. Once students have completed the registration process the Username Identifier Sheet will populate.
2) The second feature we added is a Roster Order. This is a sortable column added to all student tables that the teacher sees. For example, the leaderboard naturally displays the students in an order with the highest score first. With this new Roster Order column, teachers can re-order the leaderboard to match the order of the gradebook. It is available on the teacher dashboard under "view roster" for each individual class.
Our goal is to maximize student privacy while creating a process that is still easily used by teachers.
Additionally, please note that the Pre-Simulation Survey closes on the day of the simulation start. Please have your students complete the survey at Student Home>Written Test.
All other quizzes are open until the end of the simulation.
Please feel free to reach out to us if you need further assistance. You may contact our Help Desk by going to budgetchallenge.com.