New Passwords to Start the Year!

Students at Haycock Elementary and around FCPS use technology frequently in their classrooms and at home. To keep their accounts secure, their passwords need to be reset once a year. A task that was once automated for many students in primary grades has now been replaced by something that will lead to better account security for all of our students.

During the first three weeks of the school year, teachers and Haycock's School-Based Technology Specialist (SBTS) Ben James worked together to implement this new system. We shared tips about choosing passwords that were easy to remember, but hard for others to guess. Now that all student passwords have been reset successfully, it's up to our students to practice using them in order to commit them to memory.

If you have a student in grades K-3, you should be seeing a half sheet of paper with his/her login information. The username will be a 7-digit number that begins with 1; the password is likely a short word that they've chosen with a number added to the end. That is not the case for all students, but it was a pattern with which many students were already comfortable. You can help all students commit their passwords to memory by using many websites that require the same login information at home. These include:

• Google Apps for Education, also known as GSuite
• FCPS 24-7 Blackboard
• MyOn, an online reading resource with over 5,000 books to choose from
• Wixie, a graphics and drawing program available for grades K-5

Instruction on the use of all of these websites and more will be provided throughout the school year in technology lab lessons and in classrooms by teachers and our SBTS.