Email Aliasing - Regarding setting up emails for students that may not have an email address:
Every user in Word of Life needs to be unique in order for the WOL student progress to be calculated/measured properly. Creating a unique user is accomplished with a unique email address.
If a parent has a 2nd email address, they can use their 2nd email to invite their child. An important reminder to the parent is that once they invite their child from their computer, they need to log out of their Parent WOL Portal on the computer. Once they log back into their 2nd email address, they/the student is to accept the student WOL email invitation. When the student is logged in, they can begin to use WOL. The parent/student can stay logged in to WOL and do not need to log out. If they choose to log out, they would go to http://wordoflifeseries.org and select "LOGIN" and follow the prompts.
If the parent does not have a 2nd email address, the parent can check with their personal email provider to be sure the provider supports using an alias email. By using the aliasing, all emails are directed to the one Parent user and our system recognizes multiple users. We have found many providers do support an alias.
GMAIL Provider Example: Parent email is SJones@gmail.com
Parent creates an alias for their child with this naming convention: SJones+johnstudent@gmail.com.
GMAIL will push the SJones+johnstudent@gmail.com email into SJones@gmail.com email.
If a parent has multiple children, here is an example if we were to take my email address and create [3] unique users/children,
renee.collins+john@augustineinstitute.org
renee.collins+sally@augustineinstitute.org
renee.collins+junior@augustineinstitute.org
Our system sees three unique users, John, Sally, and Junior, but all emails would go to renee.collins@augustineinstitute.org as the system does not read anything after the “+”. To log in for each user, you must use the alias email address, meaning, if John wanted to log in, he must use renee.collins+john@augustineinstitute.org.
With this method, I would suggest using a password instead of the email verification to log in as it can get confusing flipping back and forth to one’s email but that is just a suggestion, not necessary for it to work properly.
How to create a Word of Life Portal Password
I created a short video that you can share with your parents, it’s just me walking through the process of signing up a child from the start of registering as a parent. I also walk through some of the content on the portal for the parent to utilize. Let me know if there is anything else you think would be helpful for the parents or catechists.
Video Instructions for Parents
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Katie Comerford
Mission Expansion Specialist