Password Management for Educators

Educators create many passwords for accounts in both their personal and professional lives. Password management is crucial for educators, not only to keep track of their professional passwords but also to separate those from their personal passwords. Teachers need a reliable place to store passwords for many online accounts, applications and programs, no matter which grades or subjects they teach.

Read more to learn why password management is essential for teachers.

The importance of password management for educators

In educational settings, password management is important because schools must comply with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to receive funding from the Department of Education and protect students’ private information. If an educator commits a FERPA violation, it could be detrimental to the privacy of students and parents. Some of these violations include emailing private student information, posting grades publicly, revealing a student’s academic status or even releasing a student’s Social Security number.

Since educators and school faculty are in charge of keeping student data safe, educators must know how to protect information belonging to students, parents and themselves. If educators are not careful with how they store students’ or parents’ sensitive information, they risk exposing this private data as the result of a cyber attack. Because teachers work long and full hours, the last thing they should have to worry about is the safety of their passwords. Password management expedites the login process for teachers and gives them more time to work on creating the best lesson plans for their students.

The best password manager for educators

Keeper^® is the best password manager for educators because it protects teachers’ data in a digital vault, keeps schools safe against data breaches and allows educators to keep their professional and personal information separate. Across the United States, schools of all grade levels have chosen Keeper to store their passwords and confidential information in a secure, online location.

In 2019, Oregon State University (OSU) consolidated its various IT departments into one centralized unit to manage its procedures and password management. Many of its IT teams previously relied on spreadsheets to keep track of passwords and shared passwords in unsecured ways, like over email or text messages. OSU’s solution was to use Keeper Password Manager for their IT team because they wanted a password manager with unparalleled security features, safe password sharing, password generation, mobile device access and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) capabilities. 

Josh Zojonc, Lead Infrastructure Engineer at OSU, said, “Now that we have a tool for making regular password changes, we can start incorporating a new password refresh policy into the automation projects we have on the drawing board.”

OSU isn’t the only school to benefit from Keeper Password Manager. In 2022, West Virginia University (WVU) needed to transition from an older, slower password manager with limited access controls, so they decided to replace their password management solution with Keeper. Whinston Antion, Assistant Director of Identity & Access Management at WVU, said, “As soon as we got Keeper, it went right into our governance policies and procedures. We have the utmost confidence in the tool.” Keeper allows WVU to audit accounts, give Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) and maintain strong password security with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

See how Keeper’s unique features can help you work more effectively and safely within your school.

Keeper enables secure access to educational platforms

As someone with teaching experience, I can attest to how many online accounts and educational platforms teachers need login credentials for. From Google Classroom to Blackboard and Canvas, educators need a password manager that securely stores and autofills their credentials for each website. By keeping login credentials in Keeper Password Manager, educators can reduce the risk of using weak or reused passwords, because Keeper will flag these types of passwords as jeopardizing the safety of your accounts. For example, if an educator uses the same password to log in to their school computer and Blackboard account, Keeper will suggest changing these passwords to be strong and unique from each other. Having weak passwords can lead to ransomware attacks or someone gaining unauthorized access to accounts and potentially stealing private information belonging to students, parents or yourself.

Keeper ensures student data remains protected

Thinking back to my first Meet the Teacher night, my more experienced colleagues advised me to collect parent information on paper forms because it was easier for parents to quickly write down their phone numbers, email addresses and other personal information. However, educators handle sensitive student and parent information that should not be easily accessible, either physically or digitally. The types of information an educator may possess include student allergies, birthdates, home addresses, phone numbers, disability forms, email addresses, grades and disciplinary records.

Using Keeper ensures that sensitive student information is strongly protected in a digital vault, which can help protect student and parent data, even in the event of a data breach. Your Keeper vault encrypts all of the data you enter, which means that it is all stored in unreadable ciphertext that only the owner can convert back to plaintext with their master password. You can store more than just passwords in your vault, such as pictures and PDF documents.

Keeper facilitates safe collaboration between educators

Whether you have multiple teachers sharing records among one grade level or professors sharing records in one department, Keeper understands how essential collaboration is for educators. Keeper’s password-sharing feature allows you to send files and records securely without compromising passwords or private information. Rather than keeping track of passwords on a spreadsheet and then sharing them over email with your colleagues, using Keeper Password Manager provides educators with zero-trust and zero-knowledge encryption to store and share data securely.

Keeper helps ensure compliance with school policies

Since many schools have specific security policies regarding data management, Keeper helps educators adhere to these policies by keeping passwords protected in a secure password manager. Educators comply with school policies by using Keeper to generate, store and securely share passwords. Some schools may even enforce the use of a password manager like Keeper for educators, allowing the IT department access only to customize access privileges but never to see the contents of your digital vault.

Keeper helps educators securely manage personal and professional accounts

Speaking from experience as a teacher who used Google Workspace every day, I remember being very frustrated when my lesson plans for the week ended up in my personal Google account by accident. A great way to combat the blending of personal and professional information online is to utilize Keeper Password Manager, which offers both a personal password vault and a business password vault. As a teacher, separating personal accounts from educational accounts is crucial for keeping personal information at home and educational information in the classroom. You can sign in to your professional password manager while at school to make sure that any passwords that autofill into websites are for your educational accounts, not your personal accounts. Keeper’s app makes it easy to switch between your different accounts by selecting which email address you want to log in with. You can download the Keeper app on your desktop or phone, and install the browser extension on any web browser.

Protecting educators with Keeper

Educators need to keep their information safe, as well as the information that students and parents entrust them with. An easy way for educators to keep everyone’s information safe is to rely on Keeper. Start a free 14-day trial of Keeper Password Manager today to see how convenient and safe it is to store and share passwords in an educational setting.