Student Accounts

LearnPad can connect to existing student account servers to verify identity, discover network shares, and annotate submitted work. Student accounts are seperate from LearnPad website user logins, which are only required for teachers and administrators.

LearnPad currently supports Active Directory (or other LDAP systems) and a simple identity system that does not require passwords or an authentication server.

Adding Accounts

Accounts can be added from the account management page by tapping the Add New Account link. Once an account has been added its properties can be edited and it will be listed on the account management page from which it can be edited. The types of account are:

Simple Account Type

Simple accounts allow students to enter their name without requiring a password. Their identity is not checked against any authority and is not verified in any way. This account type is useful for younger students who can't manage passwords or for environments where ther is no identity authority, but identity would still be useful for annotating submitted work.

LDAP or Active Directory Account Type

LDAP accounts check student identity against an LDAP server and require that the user enters their allocated ID and password. LDAP servers must be configured with the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and server name (or IP address). More details can be found here.

Inheritence and Precedence

LearnPad currently only supports one account definition at a time and will use the first account defined. If a device does not find an account in the enrolled organisation it will check the parent organisation and so on. If no accounts are found, LearnPad will default to using a default Simple account type.

Avatars

LearnPad uses a simple avatar (identity picture) system to show which student is logged into a tablet. The avatar is randomly generated based on the student's user name, so they will get the same avatar each time. The default avatar provider is robohash, which uses fun school-safe pictures of robots such as these:

You can specify an alternative avatar provider for an account by changing the Avatar URI Pattern property. Some examples are shown below.

Gravatar Identicon

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=identicon&s={size}

Gravatar Wavatar

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=wavatar&s={size}

Gravatar Retro

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=retro&s={size}

Gravatar Monster

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{hash}?d=monsterid&s={size}