teachChat

No. Students join with a class code, pick a screenname and a 4-digit PIN, and they are in. No emails, no passwords to forget over the weekend, no accounts for anyone to provision. You are the only person who signs in with a real account.

Sign in with Google, connect Drive, name a class, and put the join code on the projector. Students join after their names are saved to your Drive and you approve them. Everything else, points, buddies, polls, the overlay, is optional and can wait until you want it.

Yes, and you should. Signing in gives you a demo class populated with fictional students who actually talk, so you can practice freezing chat, holding a message, and running a poll before a real class is watching. There is also a narrated walkthrough on the About page if you would rather watch first.

Any modern browser: school Chromebooks, laptops, tablets, desktops. Nothing to install and no app store involved, which also means nothing for your IT department to push out. If a device can open a website, it can join a class.

Technically, no: there is nothing to install and no network configuration to change. Organizationally, yes, and you should. Before inviting students you are confirming your school has approved teachChat through someone authorized to make that call. The Trust page is written to be forwarded to exactly that person.

Not into our database. A student's first name and last initial are checked in memory, so nobody can impersonate a classmate. The name must be saved and verified in your Google Drive before the student can join. A disconnected Drive or a failed save blocks joining. Our database only ever holds the screenname; approval and sign-in checks read names temporarily from your Drive.

Yes. Build the class from a roster sheet in your own Google Drive instead of having students type a name. Your browser reads the sheet, and the initial import sends us only screennames and generated PINs. Your browser saves names directly to your Drive. Sign-in, approval, reveal, and export checks temporarily read those records; names are not saved in our database. Fill in the name column for every student before sharing sign-in cards. Full walkthrough: Roster imports.

Screennames, always. Real names are visible only to you, and only when you ask. Every reveal is written to a permanent audit log with the time and the account that did it, so there is a record to stand behind if anyone ever asks how a name was used.

The server refuses it. The join form accepts a first name plus a single last initial and rejects anything more, so the minimization is enforced at the door rather than trusted to a 12-year-old reading instructions.

None of it is collected, and most of it is not possible. Students cannot upload images. There is no field for a phone number, a birthday, or an address, and we do not request location.

Layers. A server-side filter checks every message before anyone sees it, and it is built for how kids actually evade filters: spaced-out letters, l33t spellings, lookalike unicode, words split across two messages, and copy-paste ASCII walls. On top of that you get review-before-post, slow mode, pause chat, timeouts, and your own per-class blocked words. Blocked messages are never shown to the class, and repeat offenders are timed out automatically.

No, and the design assumes you are teaching, not moderating. The filter runs whether you are looking or not, review-before-post holds everything until you release it when you want maximum control, and pausing chat stops new student messages when you need the class back. What no software can do is replace supervision, which is why the filter is a floor and not a promise.

You can hide or delete any message, time out or remove the student, and pause the room while you deal with it. Students can also report a message: the report includes a snapshot of the surrounding conversation so it can be understood in context, and it comes to us by email. Filters miss things. That is exactly why every one of those levers is in the free plan.

No. Moderation is rule-based and runs on our servers. Student messages are not sent to any AI provider, and student data is never used to train AI models. If that ever changes it requires review, disclosure before activation, and any authorization the law requires, and it would flag content for you rather than punish a student on its own.

Yes, and the main part is always on: every first-time joiner waits in an approval queue until you let them in, and no setting turns that off. You see the name and the screenname they picked before they can say a word. If a code has escaped into the wild you can also lock the class so no new joins are accepted at all, and there is an optional stricter setting that re-holds returning students on every sign-in. Details: The waiting room.

The room is yours. Sessions run when you run them, you can pause chat at any moment, and new students need your approval to join. Students cannot post when the session is ended. They can sign out on a shared device when class is over.

A second view built for the board at the front of the room: chat, polls, and shared notes at projector scale, with the ability to put a website, a slide, or your own screen behind it. It is the piece that makes the room feel like a live stream instead of a worksheet.

They are aimed at a specific problem: the kids who never raise a hand. Points come from participating, not from clicking, so a buddy grows because a student took part. Tapping a buddy makes it dance and does nothing else, on purpose. You decide whether participation data has any bearing on grades; nothing here does that for you.

Standings are by screenname and by house, not a public ranking of real names. You see more than the class does, which is the point: the tool should tell you who has not spoken today without announcing it to the room.

Your first class is free forever, and you never need a card to use it. Premium is $24.00 a year or $2.99 a month, and it adds more class periods and uncapped live minutes. The yearly option works out to $2.00 a month. Prices are for a teacher's own wallet rather than a district purchase order, and the exact amount is shown before you ever enter a card.

Yes. Business offices often cannot type a card into a website, so email support@teachchat.app with how many teachers you need covered and you will get a proper invoice to hand to your district. This is also the right path if your district wants a signed data privacy agreement first.

One active class and 30 minutes of live session time per day, plus every safety, privacy, moderation, and audit feature. Those limits are shown inside the app so you are never guessing where you stand.

No, and it is written into the Terms rather than left as a promise on a marketing page. Pause chat, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, blocked words, and the reveal audit log stay in the free plan. Paid plans buy more classes and convenience, never a safer room.

Exports go straight to your own Google Drive, or download as files, so your school keeps its records in accounts it already controls. Chat log, participation, per-day summaries, shared notes, roster, and the reveal audit log are all exportable, and every export is itself logged.

Both are one click. Deleting a class erases its chat, points, roster, and logs from our live database. Deleting your account erases every class you own the same way, revokes our access to your Google account, and leaves files already in your Drive alone, because those are yours. What remains afterward is a small administrative record of the account itself, kept for tax and legal reasons, with nothing from inside a classroom.

It deletes itself. A class with no activity for 12 months is removed automatically by a job that runs every day, so forgotten classes do not accumulate on our servers forever. You do not have to remember to clean up after June.

From the live database, immediately. The honest footnote is backups: we keep encrypted backups so a disaster cannot erase your class, and a deleted class sits inside those until they rotate, which takes at most 180 days. Backups exist to recover from data loss and are never used to bring a deleted class back.

teachChat is built for supervised classroom use under a teacher's direction and collects the minimum needed to run a session. Because names are never stored on our servers and students provide no contact information, the personally identifiable information in our systems is minimal by construction. For students under 13 we rely on school authorization, and the Privacy Policy is written to serve as the direct notice a school needs in order to give it. Compliance is a shared job, and the policy says plainly which parts are ours.

Send it over. If your district has its own DPA we will review and sign it, and a signed school agreement controls over our standard documents wherever student data is concerned.

The United States and its territories only. That is not just a line in the terms: requests from outside that area are turned away before they reach the application. A one-person service cannot credibly satisfy every country's privacy law at once, so this one is built for U.S. classrooms under U.S. student privacy law and says so.

Yes. Before running a class you read and accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and we record which version you agreed to and when. That way there is a real answer to what was agreed rather than a link somebody may or may not have seen.

There is a written response plan: contain it, work out what was actually exposed, then notify. Schools hear from us quickly because the records are yours, and the rest of the order follows what the law requires. We will not know everything on day one, and you will hear what is confirmed rather than silence while a tidy story is assembled.

One New Jersey public school teacher, which is both the pitch and the limitation. There is no support tier, no sales team, and no 24/7 operations desk. There is also nobody whose incentives point at collecting more data than a classroom needs. Email reaches the person who wrote the code: support@teachchat.app.