teachChat

The questions teachers actually ask. 🌱

Frequently asked questions

Answered by the person who wrote the code. Nothing here is aspirational: if teachChat does not do it yet, this page says so.

📖 Looking for the manual?

This page answers questions. The teachChat guide teaches the product, and it grows into a full user manual over time: setup, every moderation lever, the projector overlay, points and houses, and a page for each classroom buddy. It is the place to send a colleague who asked "how do I actually use this."

Start at Getting started · Send students to For students · Stuck on something? Troubleshooting

🚀 Getting started

Step-by-step version with screenshots: Getting started in the guide.

Do my students need accounts or email addresses?

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.

How long does it take to run my first class?

About two minutes. Sign in with Google, name a class, put the join code on the projector. Students type the code on their laptop or Chromebook and start posting. Everything else, points, buddies, polls, the overlay, is optional and can wait until you want it.

Can I try it without involving students?

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.

What devices does it work on?

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.

Do I need my IT department to approve anything first?

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.

🔒 Student privacy

The short version lives here; the full version is the Privacy Policy and Privacy and your students' data in the guide.

Where do student names actually go?

Not into our database. A student's first name and last initial are checked once, in memory, so nobody can impersonate a classmate. If you have linked Google Drive, the name is written to a roster file in your own Drive and discarded on our end. If you have not linked Drive, the name is discarded without being stored anywhere. Either way our database only ever holds the screenname.

Is there a way for names to never touch your servers at all?

Yes. Build the class from a roster sheet in your own Google Drive instead of having students type a name. The sheet is read in your browser, and only screennames and generated PINs are sent to us. In that mode we never receive a student name in the first place. Leave the name column empty and reveal simply stays off for those students, because we genuinely do not have the names. Full walkthrough: Roster imports.

What do classmates and the projector see?

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.

Can a student type their full last name anyway?

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.

What about photos, phone numbers, or location?

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.

🛡 Safety and moderation

Every lever, in detail: Moderation and safety.

What stops kids from posting something awful?

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, instant freeze, timeouts, and your own per-class blocked words. Blocked messages are never shown to the class, and repeat offenders are timed out automatically.

Do I have to read every message as it happens?

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 freeze stops the room instantly 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.

What if something gets through anyway?

You can hide or delete any message, time out or remove the student, and freeze 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.

Do you use AI on student messages?

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.

Can I control who gets into my room?

Yes. Turn on approval and every join waits in a queue until you let them in, which is the setting to use if a code has escaped into the wild. You can also lock a class entirely so no new joins are accepted. Details: The waiting room.

🎓 Running a class

The features that make it feel like a stream rather than a worksheet: polls, notes, and the vibe check, the projector overlay, and points, the shop, and Hype Houses.

Can students chat when class isn't running?

The room is yours. Sessions run when you run them, you can freeze at any moment, and you can require approval to join. Nothing about teachChat lives on a student's device after class beyond their session on that laptop or Chromebook.

What is the projector overlay?

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.

Are points and buddies just a distraction?

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.

Can students see who is winning, or who is quiet?

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.

💵 Cost and plans

What does it cost right now?

Nothing. teachChat is not charging anyone today. When paid plans do arrive they are priced for a teacher's own wallet rather than a district purchase order, expected to land between $1.99 and $2.99 a month, and the exact price is shown before you ever enter a card.

What does the free plan include?

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.

Will safety features ever be paywalled?

No, and it is written into the Terms rather than left as a promise on a marketing page. Freeze, 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.

📦 Your data: exports, deletion, and backups

How do I get my data out?

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.

How do I delete a class, or my whole account?

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.

What happens to a class I set up and forget about?

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.

If I delete something, is it really gone?

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.

🏫 For districts, and the paperwork

The page to forward to an administrator is Trust.

Is it FERPA and COPPA compliant?

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.

Can you sign our data privacy agreement?

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.

Where is teachChat available?

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.

Do teachers have to agree to anything?

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.

What happens if there is a security incident?

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.

Who is actually behind this?

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: dalton@daltonjfowler.com.

Still stuck?

Check Troubleshooting in the guide first, since the common ones are solved there. If that does not do it, email dalton@daltonjfowler.com and you will get an answer from a teacher, not a ticket queue. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome and often shipped the same week.

More depth: The guide · Trust · Privacy Policy · Terms · About