Anonymous or per-user: what an activity records

Every activity runs in one of two modes: anonymous, where the app never links work to a student, or per-user, where it records who did what. The mode decides what you can see afterwards, so it’s worth choosing deliberately, especially for graded work.

Students sign in with their school account either way. The mode isn’t about who can open the activity; it’s about whether their work is linked to their name.

Anonymous: you see what, not who

In an anonymous activity the app stores no link between a student and their work. On the statistics page for a code you see how much the activity was used, and you can still open and read every conversation, but nothing tells you which student it belongs to. Anonymity hides who, never what.

Anonymous is a good fit for practice and exploration: students can ask basic questions or make mistakes without worrying that it lands next to their name.

Per-user: you see who did what

In a per-user activity the app records the author. The statistics page for a code shows how many different students took part and names the student behind each conversation or quiz attempt, and for a writing activity you can open each student’s saved text together with their coach conversations. Choose per-user when you need to review or grade individual work.

Tell your class when an activity records who did what, so nobody assumes they are practising anonymously.

The defaults by kind

Each kind of activity has its own default:

Kind	Default	Why
Tutor	Anonymous	Chatting with a tutor is practice; students should feel free to ask anything.
Quiz	Anonymous	Answers feed the aggregate statistics without naming anyone.
Writing	Per-user	Reviewing a saved text needs an author, so writing records one by default.
Coding	Always anonymous	Requests from a coding tool carry no student identity; there is no setting to change. Picking up the connection key is the one exception, always recorded with the student’s name.

Where you set it

The mode comes from the anonymous field in the activity’s YAML file. Omit it to keep the kind’s default, or set it explicitly. This example from a writing activity spells out the default rather than relying on it:

# Writing defaults to attributed (anonymous: false): the teacher reviews and
# grades the saved letters, so they must know whose text it is.
anonymous: false

For a tutor or a quiz, anonymous: false switches the activity from its anonymous default to per-user. A coding activity has no anonymous field at all; adding one is rejected as an error. Coding keeps its own fixed exception regardless: a student’s coding conversations stay anonymous, but picking up the connection key their tool needs is always recorded with their name, covered in the chapter on connecting a coding activity.

The choice is frozen when you create a code

When you create a code, the activity’s current mode is fixed onto that code and stays with it for its whole life. Editing the activity file later does not change codes that already exist; the edit only affects codes you create afterwards. If you change your mind, create a new code from the updated file and share that one instead.

Anonymous writing turns off saving

A writing activity set to anonymous: true has no author to save a text under, so saving is disabled: students see no Save button and their draft is gone when they leave the page. The coach chat and the formatted preview still work, so the activity remains useful as a pure practice space. Keep writing per-user whenever you plan to review or grade the texts.

Creating a shared code

Seeing how a code is used

Connecting a coding activity to an outside tool

Writing: students draft, a coach advises