🌱 Welcome to the teachChat guide
teachChat puts a live, gamified chat on top of whatever you are already projecting. Students react, answer, and ask questions from their own devices, and you hold every moderation lever. This guide walks you through all of it, one page at a time.
What is teachChat?
teachChat is a live-stream-style chat built for real, in-person classrooms, grades 7 and up. You project a lesson; students type 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 one public school teacher, for the room teachers actually stand in. Participation becomes the game: points, team hype meters, one-tap polls, and a study guide the class writes together, each one a toggle so you can run it as plain or as playful as your room can handle. The safety rails are yours too: freeze, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, per-class blocked words, and an automod that can hold a message before the class ever sees it.
No student emails, no student accounts
Students never create an account or hand over an email address. Joining takes a 6-letter class code, a first name plus last initial (there is nowhere to type a full last name), a screenname, and a 4-digit PIN so they can sign back in from any device. Everything runs in the browser, so school Chromebooks and laptops are all a class needs.
Classmates only ever see screennames. Real names are visible to you alone, and every time a name is revealed it lands in a permanent audit log.
What each page covers
- Getting started: create your first class, start a session, and try the whole thing yourself from a second tab in about ninety seconds.
- The projector overlay: float the chat over your slides, YouTube, or PDFs on the projector, with a playlist to preload the whole period.
- Moderation: freeze, slow mode, review-before-post, timeouts, blocked words, and the automod. Chat preferences, not surveillance.
- Join approval: how class codes work and how you decide who is on your roster.
- Points and houses: participation points, Hype Houses filling a shared hype meter, leaderboards, and the sticker shop.
- The buddy compendium: every plant buddy and their friends, with real sprites, life stages, and the stories behind the names.
- Polls, notes, and vibe checks: ask a question and watch answers pile up live, bundle the same-idea ones, and mark every answer that's right. Students tag notes and vote them into a shared study guide. Vibe checks let students tap how they're doing, and only you see the tally.
- For students: a page written for your students. Share it when you introduce teachChat to a class.
- Privacy: screennames in chat, real names for the teacher only, the reveal audit log, no ads, no analytics, no data sales, and exports that go to your own Google Drive.
- Troubleshooting: what to check when something in the room isn't behaving.
Where teachChat is at
teachChat is in alpha: live at teachchat.app, evolving weekly, and growing with a handful of adventurous classrooms. Like any good sapling, it gets a little bigger every week.
Where to start
Head to Getting started. You can plant your first class and see chat land on your projector before the bell rings.
You don't need students to try it: open a second tab, join your own class with the code, and chat with yourself. No account needed for the student side.