Signing Up Your Students to Use SimplyBox

Let's say you want to get your class using SimplyBox, but you want to sign up your students directly (and avoid having the students need to enter a personal email address).

Here is one way that allows you to do this, and still keep unique account id's for each student (so you will be able to see who is commenting and/or adding content). This method is made possible because of a handy feature of Google's free and popular Gmail service, which allows you to use virtual email addresses associated with a single account. (If you are curious, check out this blog )

Here's how it works:

1. Setup a single new email account in Gmail that you will manage. It might be something like: biologyclass@gmail.com
2. Register your students as new users at simplybox.com. You can make up the username and password for each student, which you will provide them at the end. For the email address, you can use the above address as the “base” and then add the username for each student to it. You do this by adding “+username” into the email address like: biologyclass+username@gmail.com
   
   For example:
   
   
   Student: Johnny Appleseed
   SimplyBox Username: johnnya (you make this up)
   email address: biologyclass+johnnya@gmail.com
   
   Student: Jane Doe
   SimplyBox Username: janed (you make this up)
   email address: biologyclass+janed@gmail.com
   
   … and so on for each student …
   
   
3. Now, you will receive a SimplyBox new user verification email for each student. Here's the cool thing: All of the emails you entered as above actually go to the same address: biologyclass@gmail.com The extra “+username” part is ignored by Gmail for now. So you can login to your Gmail account and verify each of the student accounts by clicking the link in each email you receive from SimplyBox – one for each student.
4. Now you are ready to give out the username and password to each student and they will be able to start using the service. Since they all have their own SimplyBox username that you created, you'll see who is making comments or adding boxes. And since all the emails associated with their accounts are the email you setup and manage, (biologyclass@gmail.com), none of the students had to have or use a personal email address to use the service.

Optional for Advanced Gmail Users: All future SimplyBox-related emails will also be directed to this account for each student. If you want to keep the account more organized you can use Gmail Filters to automatically separate the emails for each student-account within your Gmail account. Basically, you would just add a separate Filter for each student, that looks for biologyclass+username@gmail.com as the “To” address and assign a “Label” (like a folder, in Gmail terminology) to the message for username. So if the message To: is biologyclass+johnnya@gmail.com, the Label might be: johnnya. This part is entirely optional, but might make it even slicker to manage the different emails generated by all the student accounts.