Most classroom software has a simple architecture: your students' names go to a company's server, and the company promises to take care of them. The promise is usually sincere. It is also the only thing standing between a class roster and everyone the company hires, acquires, or fails to keep out.
Our Education tools are built the other way. The software runs in your browser, but your book — the file holding every name, mark, and note — is a file on your computer. There is no server behind the app, no account to make, and no code in the file that could send a roster anywhere.
What "local-only" means here
- The book is a file. Roll Call keeps your term in a
.rollcallfile, Plan Book Plus in a.planbook, WellNoted in a.wellnoted. You can see it in Documents, copy it to a flash drive, or keep it in your school OneDrive folder. Moving to another computer is moving that file. - There is no server. Not "we don't look at your data" — there is nothing to send it to. The app is one HTML file.
- There is no account. Nothing to sign up for means nothing to breach, reset, or subpoena.
- The book is sealed with a passcode. Roll Call and WellNoted require one; in Plan Book Plus you add one for a shared laptop. The file on disk is encrypted with it.
Why it matters for a public school
New York's Education Law 2-d and the federal FERPA rules exist because student data that leaves a school needs contracts, security plans, and disclosure procedures. A tool that never receives student data has nothing to contract about: the data never left your computer. That is a design decision, not a legal opinion — your district's rules still apply to what you do with your own files, and none of this page is legal advice.
How we prove it
Every one of these apps ships with a test that reads the final built file
and fails the release if a single network primitive appears in it — fetch,
XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, a URL pointing anywhere. If code that could
reach the internet gets in, the release does not go out. You can check the
claim yourself: open the app, disconnect from the internet, and keep working.
The honest trade
Your file is yours, which means backing it up is yours too. On a school machine that wipes browser data on every quit — many NYC DOE laptops do — the file survives because it is a real file in a real folder, not browser storage. But a lost laptop with no copy of the file is a lost book. Every app has a Save a copy button; use it the way you would photocopy a grade book.
The tools that work this way
- Roll Call — attendance for teachers who rotate rooms every period, with a printable evacuation roster.
- Plan Book Plus — schedule, lessons, standards, rosters, gradebook, and progress monitoring in one file.
- WellNoted — Danielson observation notes and write-ups for school leaders.
- Safe Roster — replaces names and IDs in a spreadsheet with codes before the file is shared.
One studio, one pattern: the browser is the runtime, your computer is the database.