In short. Signal asks your tenant only for sign-in and basic profile. Participants see their own responses and what the teacher shows the room. Teachers see their own sessions, and a colleague’s only when brought in as a participant or co-host.
What Signal asks of your Microsoft tenant
Five delegated scopes: openid, profile and email for sign-in, name and
email address; User.Read, the signed-in user’s own profile, which Signal uses to
fetch their profile photo; and offline_access, which issues a refresh token so
users stay signed in. No mail, files, calendar, directory data or write access.
Sign-in returns the user directly to your own deployment. The application ID
and
tenant-wide grant are in
Granting Entra admin consent.
What Signal asks of Canvas
Only if your Canvas administrator installs Signal as an LTI 1.3 tool. It then:
- receives the identity claims you choose at install and the user’s course role, and keeps the Canvas ID, name, email and role (not an SIS ID or avatar);
- records course membership for each person who opens it. The install grants read-only roster access, but Signal does not currently read the roster;
- creates its own assignment and writes its score to your gradebook. Over the LTI connection it touches no other assignment.
Canvas API token. The full integration also uses a Canvas API token your school issues from a dedicated Canvas account. The token carries that account’s permissions, so give it access only to the courses Signal is used in. Signal stores it encrypted and uses it for its own assignments — placing them in an assignment group and keeping Canvas dates in step. It reads the course’s assignment list to do so, and does not read your gradebook or change other assignments. To end the integration, revoke the token as well as removing the app. Setup is in Signal in Canvas.
Roles inside Signal
| Role | What they can see and do |
|---|---|
| Participant | Their own responses, plus whatever the host shows the room. Not other participants’ private comments, the host’s view or other sessions |
| Guest | The same, without an account. Their responses and group membership are kept with the session, but Signal cannot reliably recognise them next time |
| Host (teacher) | Everything in the sessions they run, including names and results. Can moderate, pause and end a session. Sees a colleague’s session only when brought in |
| Co-host | A participant the host promotes, with session-admin powers for that session. On a school account, must be at the same school |
| School administration | Run by Nurture on your behalf, scoped to your email domains. Ask us if you need named staff to hold this directly |
| Nurture staff | Support, monitoring and security, debugging and maintenance, incident response, reporting, service administration and legal or compliance obligations, from Nurture accounts only. No one can change their own role, and every action is checked server-side |
What a teacher controls per session
- Comments, questions, replies and reactions — each on or off.
- Comment visibility — private to the host by default.
- Presenter view — hide names on the shared screen and hold results back.
- Avatars — letter avatars instead of profile pictures.
- Guest joining — off by default, and subject to school policy.
- Moderation — mute or remove a participant, pause or end the session.
What your school controls
We set these on request. They apply to every teacher at your domains, and teachers cannot override them.
| Policy | Effect |
|---|---|
| No guests | Guest joining is off for every session |
| Restrict to your domains | Only email addresses at your listed domains can join. Enforced at join, and turns guests off too |
| Turn off AI assistant access | Teachers cannot connect their own AI assistant |
| Require AI assistant redaction | Names and emails become pseudonymous references and profile pictures are dropped. Names typed into free text are not removed |
| Session types | Which session types, quiz kinds and features staff can use |
Tell us which policies you want, and the domains to restrict joining to, and we will set them before your rollout.
Teachers connecting their own AI assistant
A teacher can connect their own AI assistant (such as Claude) to read their own Signal data — read-only, and limited to what they can already see.
This is the one flow that sends names, email addresses and profile pictures to an AI vendor by design, and the vendor is the teacher’s choice, under its own terms. Your school can:
- switch it off, which refuses every request, including from assistants already connected; or
- require redaction for every teacher. It replaces identity fields only — not names typed into text.
Signal’s own AI features
Signal’s built-in AI sends no name, email or ID as a field. On the Australian deployment it runs on Azure OpenAI in Australia East; other deployments use the providers in their own register. It does receive the text a feature works on — anything a teacher writes and anything participants submit — so a name typed into that text travels with it. These providers do not train on school data. See how AI is used.
Common questions
Can one teacher see another teacher’s class? +
Only if that teacher brings them in, as a participant or co-host. There is no school-wide view for teachers.
Can students see each other’s answers? +
Only what the teacher shows. Comments are private to the host by default, and presenter view can hide names and hold results back.
Can we stop people outside the school joining? +
Yes. Turn off guests and restrict joining to your email domains. Both are enforced when someone joins, and teachers cannot override them.
Does Signal read our directory, mail or files? +
No. It requests openid, profile, email, User.Read (the user’s own profile, for their photo) and offline_access. No mail, files, calendar, directory or write access.
Who at Nurture can see our data? +
Our platform administrators, for support, monitoring and security, debugging and maintenance, incident response, reporting, service administration and legal or compliance obligations, the purposes our DPA permits. The role is granted per account, only to Nurture accounts, and every action is checked server-side.
Can we have our own administrator? +
School-wide settings are currently run by Nurture on request. If you need named staff to hold that access directly, talk to us.