For schools, colleges and universities

Everything you hand out, assembled on your own laptop

Teaching generates an unusual amount of document work and almost no budget to do it with. A worksheet pulled from four sources, a scanned set of scripts that has to become one file per pupil, a pack too large for the school mail system — and school devices where installing software is not an option.

The constraint that shapes this is not privacy first, it is permission. School and college laptops are managed devices: you cannot install anything, you often cannot sign up for anything, and the budget for a tool that does one job twice a term is zero. So the work gets done on whatever free website loads, on a device the institution controls, with pupils’ marked work as the input.

Which is where privacy arrives after all. A scanned set of scripts is children’s names attached to their performance, and the school has obligations about where that goes that no individual teacher can sign away at eleven at night before a deadline.

These run in the browser that is already installed, need no account and have no quota, so there is nothing to ask permission for and nothing to expense. And because the file is never sent, the pupils’ work stays on the machine it was scanned on — provable by unplugging the network and watching the tools carry on working.

What to use

What this will not do

Worth reading before you put a client’s file through it.

  • — It has nothing to say about copyright. Being able to extract pages from a book is not permission to distribute them.
  • — Splitting a scan divides pages. It does not read names, so it cannot guarantee page seven belongs to the pupil on page six — check before sending feedback out.
  • — There is no marking, grading or plagiarism function, and no integration with any virtual learning environment.
  • — Nothing is saved between sessions. Close the tab and the working file is gone, so download what you produce.

Check it rather than trust it

Turn off your wifi and use any tool here. If the work still happens, the file is not going anywhere — that is a proof you can perform in three seconds, and it beats anything we could write. The longer version, with the protocol and the result, is on the proof page.

Everything here is free, MIT-licensed and has no account, quota or watermark. It is maintained by one person, unpaid. If it saves you an afternoon, you can support the work.