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Ask Slashdot: How To Keep Students' Passwords Secure?
First time accepted submitter bigal123 writes My son's school is moving more and more online and is even assigning Chromebooks or iPads to students (depending on the grade). In some cases they may have books, but the books stay home and they have user names and passwords to the various text book sites. They also have user names/passwords to several other school resources. Most all the sites are 3rd party. So each child may have many user names (various formats) and passwords. They emphasized how these elementary kids needed to keep their passwords safe and not share them with other kids. However when asked about the kids remembering all the user names and passwords the school said they are going to have the kids write them down in a notebook. This seemed like a very bad practice for a classroom and to/from home situation. Do others have good password management suggestions or suggestions for a single sign-on process (no/minimal cost) for kids in school accessing school provisioned resources?
If you don't want to use a password manager, create each password with a base word that is not written down, then add characters to each password that are written down. For instance, the base word could be "boxcar". Then, actual passwords might be boxcar357a, just write down the 357a. Or some variation of this approach.
I think you are totally right here. The phrasing of this question as being about 'security' is actually totally off base. From the student's perspective, there is no advantage to security. Only the textbook publishers actually benefit from security - they don't want people who haven't paid for the textbooks to read them.
For the student, what he or she actually cares about is being able to easily access he or her school stuff. The worst case scenario is not someone stealing his or her password, it's not being able to recall his or her password and thus being unable to participate in class. Lastpass etc is overthinking it. Just set the password to something simple and easy to remember, and write it down just in case they forget.