TextActivities does not store any sensitive data at all. Any student data that is stored relates only to resource or competition points scores and the completion of assignments.
Student accounts are set up by their teachers or by their school admins and are NOT based on email addresses. (No student interaction with TextActivities requires the use of an email address).
- Student usernames are automatically generated by our system based on the names entered by their teachers when they set up their accounts
- Student passwords are 4-digit numerical PINs which students cannot change (but teachers can)
Student usernames on TextActivities look like this:
ABC-FirstnameLastname (see explanation below)
- ABC represents a 3-digit alphanumeric code common to all students at the school. It is unique to a particular subscription and it is our way of associating a student with a particular subscription at login.
- Firstname and Lastname represent the names as entered when creating the student accounts.
So a student called John Smith belonging to a subscription with the unique identifier XYZ would typically have the username xyz-johnsmith (usernames are not case-sensitive, so it doesn't matter if you use caps or not), assuming that the teacher entered their name as "John Smith".
Of course, the names used to set up student accounts need NOT be actual student names, but it goes without saying that whatever is used needs to be recognizable by the teacher at the very least.
Here are some examples of various ways of identifying the student John Smith belonging to a subscription with identifier XYZ. Only number 1 uses the student's full name:
- John Smith >> xyz-johnsmith
- J Smith >> xyz-jsmith
- John S >> xyz-johns
- Jo Sm >> xyz-josm
- J S >> xyz-js
- 7Elm SmithJ >> xyz-7elmsmithj
- Sp1 SmithJ >> xyz-sp1smithj
- Student 1234 >> xyz-student1234
- 1234 SmithJ >> xyz-1234smithj
- 1234 SJ >> xyz-1234sj
Numbers 2 to 5 take increasing numbers of letters away from either the firstname or the lastname, or both.
Number 8 above uses the student's ID number from your school system, which would obviously be meaningless to us. The only downside with this would be that students would be listed according to this number rather than their names, which may make it more difficult for teachers to access the data themselves. (Unless of course the student number is somehow representative of the student's position within an alphabetical list of all students, according to their surname, in which case it would be just as effective as a system based on their actual names or initials letters of their names.)
Number 9 combines a student ID number + surname + initial. Number 10 uses a student ID number + initials, last initial first so that the student list appears alphabetically by the 1st letter of their last name. You could obviously add variations of this, such as the first three letters of the surname + first letter of first name: 1234 SmiJ >> xyz-1234smij
Another option would be to use the class name as the first name, followed by the students surname and initial, as in numbers 6 and 7 above. Number 6 uses a tutor group name, so it has the advantage of being reusable in more than one language class, whereas number 7 is specific to the student's Spanish class.
(Number 5 above is likely to run into issues with multiple students having the same initials, which would ordinarily lead to multiple students with the same username, which is not acceptable. When the system detects existing usernames, and the teacher indicates that this is an account for a new student and not a pre-existing one, it adds a number to differentiate. So xyz-js1, xyz-js2, etc.)
There is nothing in any of the above that allows us in any way to identify a student personally: no email address, no gmail account, no physical address, no telephone number. Only whatever the teacher chooses to type in to set up the accounts. And to be honest, even when this is an actual name, this is still true -- no email address, no address, nothing that identifies them.
To sum up, students are not required to actually personally identify themselves beyond basic info required to identify themselves to their teacher. The data is not useful beyond that context. It is of zero value to us or to anybody else.
And just to reiterate: we don't store ANY sensitive data. Just activity scores on language learning assigments, resources and class competitions.
TextActivities is bound by the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).