Paste-proof writing assignment

A paste-blocked, in-class writing session that needs no student accounts, no extension, and no help from IT. Here is the whole setup, what a student sees, what lands on your side afterwards, and the parts that do not work.

Set it up (about twenty seconds)

Type a title on the home page and press Create. You get two links on screen immediately: a student link and a private dashboard link. There is no account to make and no email to confirm, which also means nothing can look your dashboard link up for you later — bookmark it before you walk to the front of the room. The dashboard walks you through that, including a printable card with the link on it.

If you want a prompt shown in the editor, a time limit, a word target, or a due date that locks the assignment, use the full create form instead. Those are set when the assignment is made and cannot be edited afterwards, which is the honest state of it today.

Getting thirty students in without logins

The student link is one URL. Post it in Google Classroom, write it on the board with a URL shortener, or put a QR code on the projector. Nothing installs. On a managed Chromebook this matters more than it sounds: a tool that needs SSO or an extension needs a district ticket, and the semester is usually over before the ticket is.

Say the recording part out loud before they start. Something like: "This page blocks paste and records when you type, when you leave the tab, and when you try to paste. I will be able to watch the writing back." Teachers who tried this reported that the sentence itself did most of the work.

What the student sees

A short card asking for a name, the prompt if you set one, and three lines about what is recorded. Then a full-screen editor with a word count, a timer if you set a limit, and a save indicator. Ctrl-V, right-click paste, and dragging text in all do nothing except produce a small notice that the attempt was counted. Text they type themselves, delete, and retype is completely normal — the editor never gets in the way of drafting, and nothing is graded or judged in front of them. If Wi-Fi drops, writing continues offline and syncs when it returns. When they are done they press Submit, or the time limit submits for them.

What you get

Open your dashboard link. There is one row per student: words, active minutes, percent typed versus inserted, paste attempts, tab switches, longest idle gap, and any flags. Click a row for the replay; click through for a one-page authorship report you can print or save as a PDF. The class exports as CSV.

This is a re-enactment of a real flagged session — the same one in the public demo. Every mark on the timeline is an event the editor recorded, not a guess about the words:

Open that dashboard for real — scrub the timeline, print the report, export the CSV. Or sit in the student seat for ten seconds and try pasting into it yourself.

Where it breaks

Blocking paste does not block a second device. A student can read from a phone and retype, and the record will say the characters were typed, because they were — though transcription tends to run at an unusually even pace with very few deletions, which is visible in the replay. Extensions and dictation tools can put text in the box; that arrives as one large insertion and is flagged. The name field is whatever a student types, so it is a label, not an identity. And the tool sees only its own tab: it knows the window lost focus, never what was on the other screen. More on that in how to prove a student wrote it.

Student data, since you will be asked

Stored: the name the student types, the text, and the timing log. No email addresses, no accounts, no third-party scripts, no analytics, no ads, and nothing is sent to any AI service. Everything is deleted 180 days after the assignment is created, and you can delete it yourself at any time from the bottom of your dashboard, which wipes the text and the whole keystroke record at once. Tell students to use an initial or a student number if you would rather not store names. Full detail on the privacy page.

Read next

• How to prove a student wrote it — evidence versus detector scores, and a three-step protocol.
• The AI-proof in-class essay — how the period is structured around this.
• Keystroke replay for student essays — the exact fields on the authorship report.
• An AI detector flagged my student's essay — why detectors misfire and what actually settles it.
• Google Docs version history vs a process replay — what version history shows and what it misses.
• In-class writing assignments that can't be pasted — six designs that work in one period.
• Process-based writing assessment — a rubric for drafting evidence, and how to show it to parents.