For teachers
What a teacher actually does in Backpack Education.
Your roster arrives already synced. Your catalog is already reviewed. The rest is picking videos and opening a device.
Your class roster
Your sections and students come from your district's student information system, Clever, or ClassLink under OneRoster 1.2. Backpack never writes back to your roster. If a student is missing, misspelled, or shows in the wrong section, you flag it once from your class list; the student is hidden from your section immediately, the office is notified, and the correction is made in the student information system, not here.
Building a collection
Every video in the catalog has already been reviewed for the K–5 audience and approved by your district or school. You choose from that catalog to build a collection for a section — there is no moderation queue to wait on and nothing to submit for approval before you publish. If you want a video or channel that isn't in the catalog, you can request it; a school reviewer decides, and you hear back within the priority window you choose.
Classroom device modes
- Picture grid
- Students tap their own colored avatar on a shared classroom device. No typing, no password, no photo — every student is a colored icon, never a picture.
- Printed badge
- A student scans a printed badge to sign in on a shared device. Useful for younger grades or a device without a stored roster.
- Student SSO
- Where your school issues student accounts, a student signs in through your identity provider on their own device. No student holds a password with Backpack.
You open a device session for your section and end it; the device locks itself at the end of the school day either way.
What you can see, and what you can't
- You can see
- What each student in your sections watched, aggregated up to your principal and district in the same form.
- You can see
- Your own sign-ins, collections, requests, device sessions, and delegations, recorded in your district's audit log.
- You cannot see
- Any data outside the fields in your district's schedule of data — there is no date of birth, address, photograph, or free-text input to see, because none is collected.
- You cannot see
- Another teacher's sections, or a student who isn't on your roster.
Notices to families — the letter explaining what the service collects and how to see it — go out under your district's name, triggered automatically when your district approves the text. There is no button here that sends anything to a family.