teachChat^™

What is teachChat?

teachChat is a live-stream-style chat built for real classrooms, grades 7 and up. The teacher projects a lesson; students react, answer, and ask questions from their own devices under screennames they pick. The quiet kid who would never raise a hand will type. That is the whole idea.

It was built by a teacher, for the room teachers actually stand in: joining takes a 6-character code and a first name plus last initial (there is nowhere to type a full last name), the teacher holds all the moderation levers, and everything a class produces can be exported to the teacher's own Google Drive.

What's in the box

• 💬 Live chat with training wheels you control. Freeze, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, and per-class blocked words. Chat preferences, not surveillance.
• 📊 One-tap polls and 🫡 vibe checks. Ask the class a question and answers pile up live; bundle the same-idea ones together and mark every answer that's right (open questions usually have a few). Or let students tap how they're doing (Bet / Mid / Lowkey lost / I'm cooked, or your class's own wording). Only the teacher sees the vibe tally.
• 🔥 Hype Houses and participation points. Teams fill a shared hype meter by participating, and points buy stickers.
• 📽️ A presenter overlay. Chat floats over your slides, YouTube, or PDFs on the projector, with a playlist to preload the whole period.
• 📝 A study guide the class writes together. Students tag each note (📖 definition, 📅 date, 💡 key idea…) and the class votes it into the shared doc. The payout grows the longer the doc sits quiet, so note-taking stays steady all period, and the export reads like a study guide, not a wall of prose.
• 🏆 Leaderboards, 🛒 a sticker shop and more, each one a toggle so you can run it as plain or as playful as your room can handle.
• 🔒 Privacy as a shape, not a promise. Screennames in chat, real names for the teacher only, a permanent audit log every time a name is revealed, no ads, no analytics, no data sales. Read the policy.

See it in action

Press play. The demo cuts between the three real screens, the projector, a student's laptop, and the teacher console, while a U.S. History class puts the robber barons on trial. You play the student: you tap the vibe check and answer the poll. And you get the teacher's-eyes view, including the automod holding a message before the class ever saw it.

🎬 Simulated session, scripted against build 539196f (2026-07-17). teachChat ships weekly, so the live app likely has features this demo doesn't show yet.

Prefer a narrated tour? Here's a short explainer walking through teachChat end to end. 🎥

Want to actually drive it? Sign in on the home page to launch a live interactive demo class: the real teacher console with a fake roster that answers your polls and taps your vibe checks, so you can push every button yourself. It's a signed-in perk so the seeded rooms stay tied to real teachers.

Try it for real: the two-tab demo

You can demo teachChat by yourself in about ninety seconds. No account needed for the student side.

1. On the home page, create a class (sign in with Google, or just name one). You land in the teacher console. Hit ▶️ Start session.
2. Open a second tab (or another device) to teachchat.app, click I'm a student, and join with the code on your console.
3. Chat as the student and watch it land in the console. Then poke around: run a poll, send a vibe check, acknowledge a message for points, open the 📽️ Overlay and load a YouTube link behind the chat.
4. Done? Delete the class from the home page and every trace of it goes with it.

Where it's at

teachChat is in alpha: live at teachchat.app, evolving weekly, and looking for a handful of adventurous classrooms to grow with. If that could be your room, or you just want to say hi, reach out at dalton@daltonjfowler.com.

Built and run by Dalton Fowler, a classroom teacher. Powered by entirely too much caffeine and a small green sprout. 🌱