About these tools
Classroom management is mostly a problem of attention — yours and theirs. You cannot watch the volume, the clock and the participation spread all at once while also teaching, and the moment one of them slips is usually the moment you notice it has already gone too far. These three tools each take one of those jobs off your attention and put it on the board where the room can see it.
They are deliberately small. None of them tracks a student over time, scores anyone, or builds a profile. A noise meter that quietly logged which class was loudest would be a different product with a different purpose, and it is not one we are interested in making. These run in a browser tab, do their one job, and forget everything when you close them.
All three are free with no account, and they are free for a reason worth stating plainly: they exist so that teachers meet AnchorKite. We build software for classrooms, including Attenda, a paid attendance app. The tools are not a trial of anything and they will not start asking for an email.
Which tool for which moment
- The room has crept louder and you keep saying "voices." Put the Noise Meter on the board during group work. The bar moves with the room, so students correct themselves against something visible instead of against you repeating yourself. It is the one tool here that changes behaviour without you saying anything.
- Five minutes of packing up became eleven. The Countdown Timer in full screen makes the end of a transition a fact everyone can see rather than a judgement call you have to make and then enforce.
- The same handful of students answer every question. The Random Name Picker with "remove after picking" on draws through your whole roster before repeating, and shows who is left. That is the mechanic teachers build out of popsicle sticks and a cup — see the note below on why the remaining pile matters.
- You need groups, not individuals. The picker's sibling, the Random Group Generator, splits a roster into teams in one click.
- You want a behaviour signal that is not about volume. The Traffic Light is a red/amber/green cue for the front of the room — useful for signalling what kind of work time it is.
- You are handling the paperwork side. The Attendance Sheet Generator and Hall Pass Generator print the things you would otherwise photocopy. The full set lives on the teacher tools hub.
Why the remaining names matter more than the random draw
Ask teachers how they handle cold-calling and the same mechanic comes back described half a dozen ways: equity sticks in a cup, an equity bucket you draw from and refill only when it is empty, a toilet-paper roll cut in half so drawn sticks have somewhere to go, a divided cup where called names move to the other side, a deck of index cards worked through during the lesson.
Every one of those is the same idea, and the randomness is the least important part of it. What the physical version actually provides is a visible remainder — a shrinking pile that tells you at a glance who has not been heard from yet. The reason teachers reach for it is rarely fairness in the abstract. It is the specific experience of realising you have called on the same four students for twenty minutes while half the room quietly checked out.
Software versions of this usually get it backwards. They show you a history of who has been picked, which is the part you already remember, and hide the part you do not. That is why the name picker here shows Still to be picked above the history: the pile, on screen, in the same place whether you are at the board or projecting from a laptop.
One thing worth being clear about — none of this is participation grading, and it should not become that. The point is noticing who has not been heard from, not scoring anyone for how often they speak.
Browser-only, and what that actually means
All three tools run entirely on your device. There is no server that receives your data because there is no server involved after the page loads.
For the name picker, that means a class roster typed into the box stays in that browser tab. It is not saved to an account, not synced, and not recoverable by us, because we never have it.
For the noise meter, the browser asks permission for the microphone so it can measure volume. The audio is read as a level and thrown away frame by frame. Nothing is recorded, nothing is stored, nothing is transmitted. Closing the tab ends the access.
There are no ads and no third-party trackers on these pages. Our full position is in the privacy policy, and it is short.
Frequently asked questions
Are these classroom management tools really free?
Yes. There is no account, no trial, no paid tier and no ads. Open the page and use the tool. They are free because they exist to introduce teachers to AnchorKite, the company that makes them.
Do I need to install anything?
No. All three run in the browser tab you already have open. They work on a laptop, a classroom desktop, an interactive whiteboard, or a phone. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed.
Does the noise meter record my classroom?
No. The browser asks for microphone permission so it can measure volume, but the audio is never recorded, never stored and never sent anywhere. It is read as a level and discarded frame by frame. Close the tab and the microphone access ends.
Do my student names get uploaded anywhere?
No. The name picker reads the list straight from the textarea in your browser. There is no server involved, so a class roster never leaves the device it was typed on.
Will these work on my school network?
In most cases yes, because there is nothing to install and no login to get past. If your district blocks unfamiliar domains you may need anchorkite.com allowlisted, which is usually a quick request since the site sets no cookies and collects no student data.
Can I project these for the whole class to see?
Yes, and that is how they are meant to be used. The noise meter, timer and name picker all have a full-screen mode with type large enough to read from the back of a room.
Coming next
A participation tracker built for a laptop rather than an iPad, and a report-card comment bank that merges a phrase library with student names and pronouns. Both came out of teachers describing the problem in their own words. The wider set is on the teacher tools hub, and everything AnchorKite makes is on the tools index.