This page describes how a teacher or a school starts using Trace, from the first conversation through the review four weeks in. Wherever a decision depends on your term dates, your students, or what your district requires on paper, talk to us rather than guessing. The routes are at the end.
What Trace is#
Trace is a library of readings, labs, and quizzes about how AI works, a class you assign that material to, and an Agent Builder where students drag typed blocks onto a canvas, connect them, and run the result on a real model with approved tools. In one class period a student might read a short article, change the inputs in a lab and watch the output move, answer a quiz, and go back to a project they are building. You choose what to assign, and you can see who started, who finished, which lab runs they saved, how they answered, and the conversations they had with the tutor or their own agents, with every view of a conversation logged. Trace does not assign a grade. It computes no score and no mastery percentage, and there is no way to export one. It is also not a general AI homework tool, and students cannot use it to produce work for another class. Lessons today are written for grades 9 to 12.
The two ways in#
A single teacher. Sign up at /sign-up and choose Teacher or educator.
You need an email address and about a prep period. You create your own class,
and students join with a code you show in class or with an email invitation you
send from the roster. Nothing about your school has to change first.
A school or district. Someone at the school signs up under School or
district, opens /account/school, and presses Set up a school workspace.
They name the school, accept the Data Processing Agreement on behalf of the
school, and press Create school workspace. Billing comes next, either
Pay by card or Request an invoice with a seat count and a PO number,
and invitations and classes activate once it is in place. The administrator
then invites each teacher with Invite staff, choosing the role Teacher
or Administrator. Every administrator, teacher, and pending invitation
reserves a paid staff seat. A district is arranged with us. Press Set up a
district, fill in Request district setup, and we get in touch. Each
school inside a district gets its own workspace, and the principal invited with
Add school becomes its administrator.
Teachers do not create schools. If your school already has a Trace organization, wait for the invitation email and accept it rather than signing up separately. The role is chosen once at sign-up and cannot be changed from inside the app, so a teacher who signs up as a student needs us to sort it out. Sign-in through your school's single sign-on works when your email domain is verified with us, which is worth raising early. Trace does not connect to your student information system and receives no records from it.
What the first four weeks look like#
The path is three meetings over about four weeks, with the in-app help panel between them.
Before the kickoff. We send the meeting invitation at least three days
ahead with a link to "Getting started for teachers"
(/resources/docs/help/teacher-getting-started). Create your account before we
meet so the time goes to your class instead of to sign-up. Decide roughly how
students will get in, either a join code on the board, which needs no email
list, or an emailed invitation, which suits students who will sign in from home
first. Both work at once. Check the devices your students will use. Chromebooks
and touch screens are supported, and very old browsers are not.
Kickoff, week 0, 30 minutes. The kickoff is a working session. You drive, signed in to your own account on the laptop you will use in class, and we talk through each step while you press it. We start by asking what you want students to be able to do by the end of the term and write the answer down, because that is the question we come back to in week four. You create the class, copy the join code, press Print code for a one-page handout, or paste your roster into Invite by email. You assign chapter 1, unit 1, "What counts as AI", due a week out; it needs no preparation and each piece of it runs in about one class block. We open Progress and the assignment page so you know where the work lands, show Mark reviewed and Write a note, and open AI activity. Last, you press Help in the sidebar and send a real message, which confirms that path works. You leave with a class, a join code or invitations already sent, one assignment due in a week, and the check- in on your calendar. A summary email with all of it arrives the same day.
The first week. Students join and you run the first block. If your class still shows no students by day four, we email you, because the usual cause is a student under 13 trying to sign up without the class code. Under-13 students must choose Student joining a classroom and type your code on the sign-up page itself.
Week-one check-in, 15 minutes. We look at your class before the call, so we already know how many students are in, who is still invited and not signed in, whether the assignment opened for everyone, and whether anyone has finished. On the call you tell us what students did when the lab opened, where they got stuck, what you found in the tutor conversations, and what you looked for and could not find. If the first week went well, we suggest an Agent Builder session as the next assignment. If something is blocking you, we fix that and add nothing.
Weeks two and three. No scheduled meeting. You assign at your own pace and use the help panel when you need us, and during the first two weeks of a pilot we aim to answer the same day.
Week-four review, 30 minutes. We bring the counts from your class, meaning students joined, assignments created, work finished, agent projects run, and how quickly we answered your messages. They describe what happened and are not offered as outcomes. We ask where students needed help to begin, whether they moved between reading, the lab, and building, whether they could get an agent to run and revise after an error, which lessons you chose and which you skipped, what in Progress and the assignment pages helped and what was noise, and whether you would use it next term. We close by asking for the one change that would matter most, and whether you will continue and what you need from us to do that.
What we ask of a school#
A pilot runs under a short agreement. It is free and carries no obligation to continue, and either side can end it in writing at any time with no penalty. We provide accounts for participating teachers and students, the lesson library and the Agent Builder, the AI model usage those activities need, and support with a reply within two business days. The school provides a named contact, the teachers who will use it, and honest feedback, and we will not ask for more than an hour a month of a teacher's time outside class.
Student records created in Trace are education records belonging to the school. Trace holds them as a school official under FERPA and uses them only to run Trace for you. What we store is listed field by field in the agreement: account details, class membership, progress and completion, quiz and unit-test answers including written responses, lab work and reflections, the projects students build, the text they enter and the model responses inside those projects, run records, and who shared what with whom. We do not collect home address, phone number, government identifiers, health or special education information, discipline records, photographs, biometrics, or location. We do not sell student information, use it for advertising, or use student work to train AI models, and every model request tells the provider not to retain it. A student's name, email, account ID, and date of birth are stripped from prompts before they leave Trace, along with text that looks like an email address, a phone number, or a street address. That filtering is automated and imperfect, and it does not recognize a classmate's name.
On request we delete a student's data, or all of it, within 30 days and confirm in writing. Within 60 days of the pilot ending we delete everything from the pilot unless you ask in writing to keep it. If student data is exposed, we notify your contact no later than seven calendar days after we discover it. If a parent asks to see or correct records, the school handles the request and we supply or correct within 15 business days of your instruction. We will not name your school, district, or teachers in anything public without separate written permission.
Four things are still being settled, and you should hear them from us now. The agreement is a draft that no attorney has reviewed, and we will not send it to you before one has. Automated deletion is not built yet, so deletion today is run by hand. The speech-to-text block in the Agent Builder is under review and is turned off for pilot student accounts until that is resolved. The security section of the agreement will name the real production controls once they are confirmed, and it will not list one that is not in place. Age gating and content restrictions are also unfinished, which is why pilots stay inside grades 9 to 12 for now. If your district requires its own paper, including the SDPC National Data Privacy Agreement or a state addendum, that replaces our data sections wherever the two differ.
On cost, a design partner pilot is free. The published school plan is $50 per teacher each month with a three-teacher minimum of $150 per month, and district plans are priced around the rollout. Which of those fits you is a conversation, so bring your teacher count and your term dates.
Getting help once you are running#
Inside the app, press Help in the sidebar footer or the round button in the bottom-right corner. The panel holds guides chosen for your role, your own past messages, and Send a message, where you pick a category (a question, something is broken, an idea, or feedback), give a title, and write. The page you were on travels with the message, so we can open the same screen. A person on the Trace team reads it and replies in the panel and by email. We answer within two business days.
A message moves faster when it names what you did, what happened, what you expected instead, and the student's username if one student is affected.
To meet, open /contact/meeting. If a time slot list is showing, pick one and
the calendar invite arrives straight away. Otherwise fill in Request a
meeting with a couple of times that work and we email you an invite.
How to start the conversation#
Talk to us before you settle any of these: which chapter suits the class you actually teach, whether to start with one teacher or a department, whether your district's own privacy paper applies, how students will sign in, and when in your term to begin. Most of them take a few minutes on a call and are hard to work out from a page.
Go to /contact, choose what it is about (the options include "Trace for my
school"), say what kind of message it is, write a few sentences, and press
Send it. A single sentence is enough to start. To talk instead of type,
book at /contact/meeting. Replying to any email we send you reaches the same
inbox, and so does writing to [email protected] directly.
Before you contact us#
Have rough answers to these and the first conversation will get somewhere:
- Who will teach it, how many classes, and roughly how many students.
- When your term or unit starts, and how many weeks you have.
- How students will sign in: school email, single sign-on, or a join code in class.
- What devices students use, and which browser.
- Whether your district requires its own data privacy agreement, and who signs.
- What you want students to be able to do by the end of the term.
What this page does not do#
It does not walk you through the app itself; "How Trace works for a teacher"
(/resources/docs/help/teacher-orientation) covers the sidebar and what Trace
records, "The grades 11-12 course guide"
(/resources/docs/help/teacher-course-guide) covers what is in the course and
how much fits, and "Getting started for teachers"
(/resources/docs/help/teacher-getting-started) gives the exact buttons for
your first class.