Nurture Signal FAQs

Students go to the join link, scan the QR code or enter the six-character session code. You can share the link from the Share window: copy it, email it, or post it straight into a Microsoft Teams channel or chat or a Google Classroom post.

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No, as long as you turn on “Allow guest students” for the session. New sessions start with guests off unless your school has chosen to start them on, and a school can switch guest joining off for everyone.

The trade-off is what you can see over time. When students sign in, you can follow each student across sessions. Guests have no account, so you can’t reliably follow them from one lesson to the next.

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Guest joining is off for that session, which is how new sessions start. Turn on “Allow guest students” in the session settings. If the switch is greyed out, your school has switched guest joining off, and students need to sign in.

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It depends on how your school has set up Signal. Students may be able to sign in with a six-digit code sent to their email, with a Microsoft account or with a Google account, and some schools use Microsoft sign-in only. If sign-in is slowing a lesson down, allow guests for that session instead.

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Yes. Signal runs in the web browser alongside Teams, so there’s nothing to install. Share a session’s join link or QR code, or press Microsoft Teams in the Share window to post the link in a class channel or chat.

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Yes. Signal works in the web browser on any modern device, including iPads, Chromebooks, laptops and phones. There’s no app to install, though students can add Signal to their Home Screen so it opens full screen.

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Pair students up on one device and ask them to agree an answer together. You’ll see one response per pair rather than per student.

A low-tech mode, where students hold up printed answer cards and you scan the room from your own device, is in preview with a small number of schools.

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Yes. Students can choose Default, Large or Extra large text, and their device remembers the choice for next time.

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Not yet. Signal’s screens are in English, but students can type their names and answers in any language.

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Yes. Make a signed-in colleague from your school a co-host of a session, or add colleagues to a group so they co-host every session in it. Co-hosts need an account, so guests can’t be co-hosts.

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There are three. An Engage session is a live session where students send check-ins, comments, poll answers and reflections. A Live Quiz is a quiz you run from the front of the room, opening questions when you’re ready. An Assessment is a quiz students work through at their own pace, with an optional due date.

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Start small: a 60-second retrieval check, one hinge question or an exit ticket, rather than a full activity. Once you’ve seen how quickly the class picture comes back, add more.

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Every session type has multiple choice questions and polls, including rating scales. Live Quizzes and Assessments add true/false, open answer, file upload, ordering and number questions. Engage sessions add open check-ins, engagement check-ins and reflections.

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Yes. In an Engage session you can add a question, poll, check-in or reflection, or have AI draft several, while it runs. In a Live Quiz you add questions and open them when you’re ready.

In an Assessment, a question you add while it’s running opens to students straight away, and once any student has submitted you can’t add more.

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Partly. You decide which questions are open, but you can open the next question before closing the last one, and each student moves on to the next open question once they’ve answered. For a fully self-paced activity, use an Assessment, where every question is open from the start.

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No. You can start a session whenever you’re ready. A scheduled time is only a label and doesn’t start anything automatically. Assessments can have an optional due date. To reuse a session next year, save it to your Library.

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Yes. AI can draft questions from a topic or from your own files, such as a unit plan, slides or curriculum documents. You can edit any question before you use it.

Before a Live Quiz or Assessment goes live, Signal asks you to confirm you’ve checked any AI-written question you haven’t looked at.

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Yes. Use the From files tab when you create a session and add up to five files, such as a lesson plan, slides or a unit outline. On the Standard plan you get three free generations from files each week; Premium has no weekly limit.

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Yes. Duplicate a session, or save it to your Library and reuse it whenever you like. From the Library you can share it with your organisation or with anyone who has the link. Colleagues can also set up a shared library, for example for a department.

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Use groups as class folders (in schools they may be called classrooms). A group holds a class’s sessions, tracks its members and shows trends across sessions. Colleagues you add to a group co-host every session in it.

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Yes, in every session type. From the participants list you can mute a student, which makes them view only, or remove and ban them from the session. Nobody else is affected.

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Yes, for open answer questions: choose a short, medium or long answer, or set your own minimum number of characters. When you ask students for a reason on a multiple choice question and make it required, you can set a minimum for that too.

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Images, yes: add up to three to a question’s description, and a picture to each answer option. Video isn’t supported. Links work in a question’s description, where students can click them, but not in the question text itself.

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Yes. Every answer box has a Text / Maths switch, so students can type fractions, indices and other notation, and it starts in Maths for questions that look mathematical. In Live Quizzes and Assessments, a file upload question lets students send a photo of their written working.

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Yes. Engagement check-ins offer suggested responses to help students explain how they feel, and you can switch them off in the session settings.

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Yes. Shuffling answer options is a session setting, and ordering questions always appear shuffled. The order of the questions themselves isn’t shuffled.

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No. Signal doesn’t have per-question timers or countdowns. In a Live Quiz you choose when to close each question.

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Yes. In an Engage session or Live Quiz, reveal a question’s answer when you’re ready, then either close the question or keep it open. In an Assessment, you choose when students see feedback instead.

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Yes. Resume a live session, or reopen an Assessment, from the session toolbar. Reopening an Assessment after its due date allows late submissions, which are marked Late.

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Yes. Change the correct answer and every student’s response is marked again. The question text and options lock once students have started answering.

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Yes, in Live Quizzes and Assessments, with a file upload question. Students can upload up to 10 photos or PDFs per answer. Engage sessions don’t have file uploads.

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The Submit & review feedback button only works once every question is answered. If the confidence step is on, the student also needs to choose a confidence level and write at least 50 characters about it.

Submitting also needs an internet connection, and it must happen before the due date unless you allow late submissions.

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In an Assessment, yes, until they submit. Once a student submits, their answers are locked. If you’ve set feedback to show after each answer, each answer locks once its feedback appears.

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In an Assessment, yes. A student’s unfinished answers show as Partial and the student shows as In progress. Partial answers aren’t scored, marked or exported.

If an Assessment closes before a student submits, nothing is submitted for them automatically.

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In an Engage session, yes. Reply privately to a student’s comment, question or check-in, and they see your reply when they reopen the session. You can’t yet reply to an individual answer in a Live Quiz or Assessment.

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Yes, in Assessments. Choose the feedback timing in the session settings: at the end (the default), after each answer, or explanation first with the correct answer when the student asks for it. In Live Quizzes and Engage sessions, students see the answer when you reveal it.

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Yes, on Premium. When you write an open answer question, Signal can write a model answer that meets the success criteria you tick, and it can suggest success criteria for you.

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It depends on the feature. Signal asks you to review AI-written questions before a Live Quiz or Assessment goes live, and AI summaries of the class are only ever shown to you.

AI feedback and AI marking in Assessments (both Premium) are different: when you switch them on, students see the feedback and marks straight away.

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Yes. When a student pastes text into a written answer, their browser reports it, and Signal shows you the pasted words (including text pasted as plain text) so you can follow up. Signal only records what happens in the session: it never sees other tabs, apps, the student’s screen or another device. There’s no setting to block pasting.

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Most answers are saved on the student’s device and sent when they’re back online. The final Assessment submission and file uploads need a connection, so students should reconnect before they submit.

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Yes. Make a question anonymous and you see the answers but not who gave them. You can’t change it once students start answering.

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Students rate their confidence, with a short comment, and write a reflection before they see their score. You can switch either step off.

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No tool can reliably detect AI, and Signal doesn’t claim to. It shows two signals, both reported by the student’s browser: which words were pasted into an answer, and how many times the student left the session view. Treat both as prompts for a conversation, not proof.

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A guess is an answer whose written reason doesn’t show the student understands it, usually a correct answer with an empty or vague reason. Don’t treat a correct guess as learning.

On Premium, Signal flags likely guesses automatically. On any plan, you can mark an answer as a guess yourself.

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The flags come from AI reading the student’s reason, and it can get it wrong, so check a flagged answer before acting on it.

If you disagree, open the menu on that answer and switch “Potential guess” or “Low effort” off. Your choice always replaces the AI’s.

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Yes. On Premium, AI insights summarise what students wrote on a question, in their quiz reflections or in comments, grouping it into themes. On every plan, Signal recommends whether to move on, recap or reteach each question.

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Each screen counts something different. The AI summary only reads answers that came with a written explanation. The session totals count every answer as simply right or wrong. The move on, recap or reteach recommendation counts a correct guess as half.

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Yes, when students sign in. You can see whether a student who got a concept wrong last week has it now, and which ideas the class keeps getting wrong, in the classroom and on each student’s profile. Guests can’t be reliably followed from one session to the next.

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Not mainly. Signal gives you low-stakes, formative information to guide your next teaching step. You choose what the class sees on the board.

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Yes, on Premium. AI can mark open answers against your success criteria or against a mark scheme you write, paste or upload. You can read the marking and its reasoning, but you can’t change an individual mark yet.

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On Premium, the teacher who created a session can save it as a PDF once it has ended, and can save a PDF for a single student. Students can save a PDF of their own work on any plan. Rating scale polls can be downloaded as a spreadsheet (CSV) on any plan.

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Yes, unless your school has switched it off. In a classroom you own, you can invite up to four parents or supporters for each student who has signed in. They get a read-only view of that student’s work.

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Yes. Every Monday, your school’s Signal admins get an email summarising the week’s sessions, teachers, students and reflections. A school can switch it off, and each admin can unsubscribe.

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Signal runs as separate deployments, and your school’s data stays in the one that serves it. Our cloud deployments store data in Australia, the European Union and the United States, always in Microsoft Azure in that region. A school or system can also run Signal entirely in its own Azure tenancy.

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Yes. Our security centre and legal pages include the Signal privacy policy, terms, acceptable use policy and list of sub-processors, and a DPIA pack for Australian schools. We’re happy to complete your school’s own DPIA, privacy impact assessment or vendor questionnaire.

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Nurture holds the Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) 2022.1 badge. Our infrastructure providers operate SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 aligned environments.

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No. Personal information collected through Nurture Signal is not used by us to train AI models, and we select AI providers on terms intended to prevent them training on customer content. The Signal privacy policy sets out the full position.

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To mark, check and summarise answers, Signal sends students’ answers and uploaded work to an AI provider, but not their account names or email addresses. Anything a student types into an answer, such as their own name, goes with the answer.

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Yes, unless your school has switched it off. A teacher can connect an AI assistant, such as Claude, to their own Signal data. Student names and email addresses can be hidden from it, and a school can require that for every teacher.

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Your school decides how Signal is used and, as the controller of the data, whether consent is needed for its students. Our privacy documents give your data protection lead what they need to decide.

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Premium adds the AI features: automatic guess and low-effort flags, AI insights, AI marking of written answers, AI feedback to students in Assessments, model answers, supporting documents, unlimited generation from files, and PDF export. Checking for understanding, live results and the move on, recap or reteach recommendation are on every plan.

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Yes. Each teacher has a weekly AI allowance, which resets every Monday, and the AI usage page shows how much you’ve used. If you use it all, AI features pause until it resets. Students are never blocked from answering.

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Signal’s Assessments cover much of what Nurture Assessments does, including students uploading their work, due dates and feedback. Signal adds quick live checks during a lesson, so you see where the class is before anything is handed in.

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Self-paced professional learning built on Dylan Wiliam’s five key strategies of formative assessment. Signal is where you put those strategies into practice, and you can open Nurture Learn from the Signal menu.

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Usually the school’s web filter is blocking Signal on the student network. Ask IT to allow Nurture’s addresses on both the staff and student policies; the allowlisting guide lists them for each region.

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Open the network check page on the school network: add /network-check to your school’s Signal address, for example signal.gonurture.com/network-check. It needs no account, tests the connections Signal relies on, and lets IT copy the results to send to us.

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Your school’s Microsoft settings need an administrator to approve Nurture Signal once for the whole school. It isn’t caused by the join link or the session. Point your Microsoft 365 or Entra administrator to our admin consent guide.

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