Set up a classroom

A classroom account lets a teacher add a class without giving upstratus any student's personal data. Each student is an alias you choose, such as Blue Fox. A student joins with a one-time code and a password they choose. Their account holds no name, no email address and no phone number.

What you need

Classroom tools turned on for your account, and a CSV file of your students (a spreadsheet saved as CSV). The Education plan is the plan for classroom accounts; see the pricing page.

0. Turn on classroom tools

Open Account, then Set up classroom tools. The Classroom page explains what the tools do; choose Turn on classroom tools. The page reloads as the Classroom screen with an empty roster. Any member of the account who is not a student seat can do this; it stores no student data by itself.

To turn the tools off again, use Turn off classroom tools at the bottom of the Classroom screen. The button is available only while the roster is empty, because a roster row is a student seat; the page says so when it is not available.

1. Add students from a file

Open Account, then Classroom. Choose Roster file (CSV) and pick your file, then Upload and add students.

The file needs a header row and one student per row. It may have only two columns:

• alias: a nickname you choose for the student. Required.
• group: a table or class group. Optional.

Any other column, such as a name or an email address, is refused by name and nothing is added, so no personal data is stored. One file adds up to 200 students.

An alias cannot start with =, +, - or @, because a spreadsheet would read it as a formula when you copy the codes. Two aliases that differ only by capital letters count as the same alias.

2. Hand out the join codes

After a good upload, the page shows a join code for each new student. These codes are shown only once: copy them or write them down before you leave the page. Only a scrambled form of each code is kept, so upstratus cannot show a code again. Use Copy on one row, or Copy all codes.

3. Replace or revoke one student's code

Each student who has not joined has two buttons on their row:

• Replace code gives that student a new code, shown once. The old code stops working at once.
• Revoke code stops the code working without issuing a new one. The student stays on the roster with No active code, and Issue a new code gives them one.

A student who has already joined has no code to replace. There is no confirmation step on Revoke code because Issue a new code puts a code back.

4. How a student joins

Students go to /education/join/ on the same site and enter:

1. Join code: the code from the sheet. Capital or small letters both work.
2. Choose a password: at least 8 characters, not a common word and not only numbers. There is no email on file, so there is no password reset. The student should write it down somewhere safe.

They choose Join class and are signed in. If a code is wrong, the screen says so next to the code box and keeps what they typed, except the password. After 10 wrong codes from one network address, the screen refuses every code from that address for 15 minutes.

A visitor who is already signed in sees a note instead of the form, so a teacher who opens this page is not signed out into a student account.

What a student account can do

A student can sign in and use projects in the classroom's organisation. They see the roster and plan screens read-only and cannot change the plan or the roster. There is no grading, no assignment feature and no connection to a school's own systems, so this guide describes none.

Errors from the roster API use the codes in the error reference.