Built for the Projector, Not Around It
Most free teacher tools are websites first and classroom displays second: the timer works, but a banner ad flashes next to it in front of thirty students. The tools here were built the other way round. The fullscreen presentation mode is the product — a distraction-free display for the smartboard — and the regular page around it currently carries no ads at all. If that ever changes, they live on the regular page only, never on the projected screen.
Which Tool for Which Moment
The set is large because a school day is made of small, very different moments, and the tools are not interchangeable. This is the short version of what to open when.
- Before anyone arrives. The seating chart generator is the one that handles the rules you actually have — keep these two apart, sit these two together, put her near the board — across rows, pods, a horseshoe or a circle. On test day, the rows layout adds an exam-spacing fill that leaves every other column empty. The classroom jobs chart settles the other recurring argument: it rotates jobs week by week so that, over a full cycle, every student has done every job exactly once — a fairness claim you can show a parent rather than assert.
- Running a whole lesson from one screen. The classroom screen puts a clock, a countdown, an agenda note, a name picker, a noise meter, a scoreboard and a traffic light on one board you present once and leave up. Open a single tool instead when you want one thing enormous and unmissable on the wall — a shared board necessarily shrinks everything it holds.
- Timing something. Three timers that solve three different problems. The classroom timer is one big countdown with presets for the routines you repeat. The station rotation timer runs a carousel: it shows which group is at which station, chimes at zero, and gives the walking its own transition countdown before the next round starts. The exam clock works in wall-clock time rather than minutes — each paper with its real start and finish, plus added rows at +10, +25 or +50% for access arrangements. One activity, a carousel, or a timetable: choose on that, not on which one you found first.
- Bringing the volume down. The noise meter listens: the room’s own volume moves the light, so the class self-monitors and nobody has to be named. The traffic light is the opposite instrument — you set it from your desk to say what this activity’s volume should be. The voice level chart teaches the vocabulary instead: the 0 to 4 scale, with a matching poster you can print, so “level 2” means the same thing on the wall and on the board. Schools that already run a voice-level system usually want the chart displayed and the meter for the moments it slips.
- Choosing a student, or splitting the room. The random name picker draws one name, always adds it to the already-picked list, and — with “Remove name after picking” left on, as it is by default — takes it out of the pool as well, which is what makes cold calling defensible: everyone gets a turn before anyone gets a second. The random team picker takes the same list and splits it into groups instead, and lets you move a player afterwards for the draws that are technically fair and socially impossible. Spin the wheel is for lists that are not names at all — topics, question numbers, who presents next — and saves each list under its own name.
- Practice the students do themselves. Most of this cluster is a teacher projecting; these three are handed over. Spelling test practice dictates this week’s words with the device’s own voice, marks them, and keeps a bank of the ones that keep going wrong. The multiplication timed test (which also covers division, addition and subtraction — the addition timed test is the plus-and-minus-only version) ends with a drill round built from the fact families that were missed. The reading fluency timer runs the standard one-minute probe and, for grades 1 to 6, places the score in the national percentile band for that grade and season, which turns a number into a decision. (Grade 1 has no autumn norm — the source study did not collect one.)
- Reviewing, rewarding, resetting. The classroom scoreboard keeps team scores on the projector and can bank them into a running weekly total if you run a points economy. The review games — whack-a-mole, plinko and four in a row — turn one question list into three different game days. And when the room needs a reset rather than a reward, the brain break generator deals an activity that fits the minutes and the floor space you actually have.
Privacy That Survives a School Review
None of these tools have accounts, logins, or student profiles. Class lists, seating rules, word lists, scores, and timers are stored in your own browser only. The noise meter is the clearest example: it reduces microphone input to a single loudness number in the browser and discards the audio — nothing is recorded, and nothing could be, because no audio ever leaves the device. When the privacy office asks where student data is processed, the answer is: on the teacher’s computer, full stop.
The exceptions, stated precisely, because a review will ask for them: the server keeps anonymous counters of page views and of which tool links get clicked — no cookies, no identifiers, and no IP address written to the database, though one is held in memory as a rate-limiting key — and the only text it ever receives is what someone deliberately types into the feedback form. That form is also the one place a third party appears: opening it loads a Cloudflare Turnstile bot check, and submitting it passes your IP to Cloudflare so the challenge can be validated. Three more details belong in the same breath, because a thorough review will find them. A view is counted for the embeddable versions too, so a tool running inside your class site is counted the way its own page would be. Each view also records the site that sent it as a bare domain — never the full referring address, and never at all for clicks from elsewhere on lans.cloud — kept twice, once as a site-wide tally for that domain and once against the page it landed on; the tool-link counter records no referrer at all. And the opt-out switch on the data page covers the page-view ping specifically: flip it and this browser stops sending that, which takes the referrer counts with it, but the tool-link counter has no switch of its own. All of it answers “are schools using this”, and none of it can answer anything about a person. If you need this in a form you can forward to IT rather than summarise, lans.cloud for schools answers the standard review checklist on one page.
Set the Class Up Once
The tools that need a roster all save it under a name, in your own browser, and that is what turns them from a demo into part of the week. The seating chart keeps each class with its rules, its chart and any desk swaps you made; the jobs chart keeps the students and the jobs together; the scoreboard keeps team line-ups that reload at 0–0; the spelling practice keeps each word list with its last score; the exam clock keeps a whole timetable under a name like “Mock week Tue”. Type the class list in September and the rest of the year is a click.
The classroom screen is the payoff: its class jobs, word list and birthdays widgets read what the jobs chart, the spelling practice and the birthday chart already saved, so the display on the wall and the sheet on the printer cannot drift apart. Build the data once in the tool that owns it, and the board picks it up when it loads.
The limit of that convenience is worth knowing before you rely on it, and it is the privacy answer above seen from the other side: all of it lives in one browser on one machine. The classroom desktop and your laptop at home hold two unrelated sets of saved classes, a profile wipe or a “clear browsing data” takes them with it, and nobody can restore them for you, because there is no account and no copy on a server. Two habits cover it: print the chart you would hate to lose, and use the data page to export everything to a single file — which you can import on the other machine, or use as the backup before you erase the lot on the last day of term.
Start With These Three
If you are setting up for a new school year: the seating chart generator handles the real-world rules (“these two cannot sit together”, “she needs the front row”), the classroom timer covers transitions and activities on the board, and the random name picker keeps cold-calling fair with an already-picked list. For test season, the exam clock adds per-paper countdowns and extra-time rows at the percentage you pick. And for review days, the whack-a-mole, plinko, and four in a row review games turn any question list into a whole-class game on the board — write the questions once and all three games share them. There is also a one-page printable cheat sheet for your desk drawer or a colleague — printed in July 2026, so a third of the tools on this page are newer than the sheet. New here and not sure where to begin? The quick-start setups for teachers walk you through five common lessons — exam day, station rotation, spelling and reading, fair picking, and settling a room — with the exact tools to open, in order.