I just spend half an hour in Setting up multiple accounts which started with a question of a teacher: how can I make bulk accounts for my students.
For Turtlestitch I'm now thinking on another way to connect students and teachers. It's more the other way around: students tell Snap! who's their teacher. The idea is fresh for me, so I think it's simple and powerful, please share your thoughts especially if you see complications!
The simple idea is that we ask at account creation if the user has a mentor (if so, provide the email address of that mentor).
The mentor has two special rights:
reset the password or email address of the mentee
look into projects of the mentee with the ability to make comments
The open/save dialog could have an extra button "notify mentor/mentee".
This would solve
Students who lost access to account (Snap! and email!)
Students not knowing how to share with teacher
Students giving the option to ask for comment on work in progress
The best thing is that you can edit the mentor field. Once you're grown up you make your account private again by deleting the mentor email entry.
We're working toward a way to solve the classroom teacher's problem about bulk account creation, driven partly by making life easier for teachers, but also heavily driven by pressure from school districts to enter into contracts whereby the district owns the student's information, including projects, because they're schoolwork. My vision for dealing this (imho) overreach by schools is to have special class accounts that are (because of student privacy laws and other reasons) sealed off from the whole community thing, so we would encourage kids to have their own personal account separate from the school's account. (We'd even tell them to do that the first time they log into the school account.)
But your one-on-one mentorship model is also worthy. Maybe some of the same mechanisms we build for school would apply to your case also.
I dunno why this all hasn't happened yet -- everyone is too busy with other projects, I guess.