When my fiance and I purchased our Samsung tablet about a year ago, we were required to enter a Gmail address for the App store and some of the other programs. Since I didn't have one, we used Mike's. When I was getting set up for EC&I 831 on Google +, Mike said that I could continue using his Gmail. I could have signed up for my own account, but I was being admittedly lazy about it. As my blog site is through Blogger (linked with Gmail) I used his email address for this as well. Once the course got going, I felt bad about Mike getting 10-20 notifications every day on his phone. However, I am unsure if I can change my email now that everything is linked to it. Anyway our school has started to use iGo accounts to share our staff news and dates. I wasn't able to log into my staff account, as I already was using Mike's account and it kept defaulting to it. Today, I attempted to sign in to iGo again. My principal said I needed to use my firstname.lastname and a generic password that was provided to us. When I put this in, I was told the password was incorrect. This made me think, hmm, have I already set up my own Gmail account in the past? I was able to change the password and log in. Sure enough, there was my old Gmail account that I signed up for in 2005 (about the time I took ECMP 355 from Alec...coincidence?). Not only was there an account already in place, but there were 260 messages waiting for me in my inbox from 7-9 years ago. Apparently I had been using Gmail to communicate with various people back when my teaching career was just beginning. I had unread messages from a former financial planner, my former administration when I worked with the Calgary Board of Education, old messages from friends. How could I have completely forgot about having a certain email address?? I am baffled by my forgetfulness. Have similar things happened to anyone else?
I find that I am always signing up for accounts to an account on a website that I really want. I struggle with remembering passwords and having to continually change my password. I have a hotmail account I haven't used for a long time. I feel as if I have digital fragmentation as well.
ReplyDeleteValerie, you are not alone!!! I too was running into similar problems of forgetting I had signed up for certain accounts. I now have a sheet (almost like a Rolodex) that keeps all of my accounts and websites that I belong to. In order to remember all of the passwords with out righting them down, I follow a trick I was taught at a conference: always use the same number, middle word and then the name of the site. For example, 67doggmail. All I have to do is change the last part to match each the sites that require a password. I hope this makes!
ReplyDeleteOk I'm glad I'm not alone! I like the term "digital fragmentation" Jackie. Amanda- that's a great idea about the passwords. I will have to keep that in mind!
ReplyDeleteValerie
ReplyDeleteI can relate to this. I set up a Hotmail account many years ago and used it pretty much every day. But then I started to acquire other email addresses (work, Sasktel). I forgot my hotmail password many times and had to reset it often. I have done this for other sites as well forgetting that I even had an account. All I had to do was submit a password reset request and I could start using the service again. It wasn't until I decided to start using Google Drive and other Google products as well as Facebook that I decided to set up a Gmail account. Just recently my wife created a Facebook account. She was using my account to like pages etc. But I told her it was time to get her own gmail account because we had different interests and I didn't want her email notification etc. going into my inbox.
It is hard to keep track of all the usernames and passwords I have for all the different sites I use. I now have a Microsoft Word document where I keep all of this information. It is a couple pages long.
I am always trying new tools/sites for the classroom and I have a whole bunch of sites needing account names and passwords. It can be a nightmare! I too have a list of sites with passwords to keep it all straight. And once I find a site that completes a specific task, (e.g. Slide Share to host my Power Point presentations online), I am reluctant to try another online tool. I am not too eager to create yet another account and account.
ReplyDelete