🎟 Roster imports: sign-in cards and maximum privacy

There are two ways students get into your class, and you pick one per class. The default is that students sign themselves up with a join code and you approve each one in the waiting room. The other is this page: you build the roster yourself from a sheet in your own Google Drive, and hand out printed sign-in cards.

The second way exists for one reason. In roster mode, student names never touch teachChat's servers at all.

Picking a mode

In your console, open 🎟 How students join. Two choices:

• 🙋 Students sign themselves up with the join code (you approve each one). The default. Fastest to start, and every new student waits for your OK.
• 🎟 I add students myself and hand out sign-in cards. Roster mode. Nobody can join with the code; the only way in is a card you printed.

Choosing roster mode locks join-code signups automatically. You do not have to remember to lock the class, and there is no window where a stray code still works. Switch back to the first mode and the code unlocks again.

Why the privacy claim is different here

In the normal flow, a student types their first name and last initial. teachChat checks it in memory so nobody can impersonate a classmate, hands it to your Drive if you have linked it, and discards it. Real names never land in our database either way.

Roster mode goes one step further: your sheet is read by your own browser, and only screennames and generated PINs are ever sent to us. There is no moment where a student's name sits in a request to teachChat, because your browser does the reading and keeps the names local. That is the most private setup teachChat offers, and it is the one to reach for if your district asks pointed questions.

This is also why there is no box on the teachChat page for pasting student names. Asking you to paste names into our site while claiming we never process them would be nonsense. The names stay in your sheet.

The three steps

1. Make the sheet

Click 📄 Create a roster sheet in my Drive. That drops a fresh, empty sheet with Name and Screenname columns into your Google Drive and gives you an open it link.

You do not have to use it. Any sheet with a Name column and a Screenname column works, including the response sheet from a Google Form you already sent your students. A leading Timestamp column is fine and gets ignored.

A Google Form with two questions ("what's your name" and "what screenname do you want") is a very pleasant way to collect this, and it lets students pick their own handle without a scramble at the start of class.

2. Fill it in

Open the sheet in Google Sheets and add your students, one per row.

Names are optional. Leave the Name column empty and everything still works: those students get screennames, PINs, and cards like everyone else. What you give up is 👁 reveal for them, because teachChat genuinely does not have their names to reveal. For some classes that is not a loss, it is the point.

You do not enter PINs. Those are generated for you.

3. Import

Click 📥 Import from my sheet and pick the sheet in Google's file picker. The picker grants your browser access to that one file and nothing else in your Drive.

teachChat shows you a preview table before anything is created. The name column is literally headed "Name (stays here)", because that is exactly what happens: it goes onto the printed cards and into a roster file in your own Drive, and nowhere else.

Check the preview, then run the import. Sixty students at a time, tops. If your sheet is longer, split it and import twice; the second import adds to the same class.

Sign-in cards

After the import you get one card per student, and a 🖨 Print cards button. Each card carries:

• The class name
• The student's name, if you provided one
• The join code
• Their screenname
• Their 4-digit PIN
• The path to follow: I'm a student → 👋 Coming back

Print them, cut them, hand them out. That last line matters, because roster students do not use the signup path. They are already on the roster, so they tap 👋 Coming back and sign in with the join code, screenname, and PIN on the card.

Cards are shown once, right after the import. Print them before you navigate away. If you lose one, you can always reset that student's PIN from the roster with the 🔑 button and write the new one down.

What students see

Roster students skip the waiting room on the way in. You already decided who is in the class when you built the sheet, so there is nothing left to approve. They enter the join code, screenname, and PIN from their card and land straight in the chat.

The one exception is the stricter setting on the waiting room page, "Also approve returning students each time they sign back in." That one still applies in roster mode, and since teachChat has no names for these students, the box would show them by screenname alone. Leave it off here unless you specifically want it.

Everything else about their experience is identical: screennames in public, points, buddies, polls. The student page covers their whole side.

Where the names actually go

If you filled in the Name column, those names are written from your browser into a roster file in your own Google Drive, alongside your other class exports. That file is what 👁 reveal reads when you need to know which student is behind a screenname, and every reveal is still written to your audit log.

Delete the class in teachChat and that Drive file stays put, because it is yours. That is true of every export teachChat makes: your records live in an account your school already controls.

If the picker will not open

Some managed Chromebooks and locked-down networks block Google's file picker. If teachChat cannot open it, you get a fallback: a box that accepts screennames only, one per line.

It is deliberately screennames-only. If you paste something that looks like a column of names, teachChat flags it rather than quietly importing it, because the whole promise of this mode is that names do not travel to us. Use the fallback to create the accounts, keep the names in your sheet, and reveal simply stays off for that class.

Which mode should you use?

Use the join code when you want to be running in two minutes, when your roster changes week to week, or when you want students to choose their own screenname live and you will vet each one.

Use roster import when you want no signup scramble at all, when you want the class locked to exactly the students you listed, or when privacy is the deciding factor and you would rather teachChat never see a name in the first place.

Neither is more secure than the other in terms of who can post. Both give you the same moderation tools, described on the moderation page. The difference is who does the typing, and how much teachChat ever learns.