Talking to students about the recording

The posture: writing-as-evidence, not AI-detection-as-policing

Most "AI integrity" tools are output detectors. They take a finished document and guess whether a machine wrote it. They're unreliable, they punish second-language and neurodivergent students disproportionately, and they put the teacher in the position of accuser holding a verdict from a black box.

Red Stet records the process of writing — keystrokes, pauses, revisions, scroll-ups — and gives the student a way to show their work, rather than be judged on whether their finished prose "sounds like a chatbot."

That changes the conversation. You're not saying "I have a tool to catch you." You're saying "I have a way for your effort to count, even when it can't be proven from the final draft alone." A gift to honest writers, a quiet deterrent to dishonest ones, no interrogation.

The day-one script 3-5 minutes

Read it out, paraphrase, or adapt. Five paragraphs, five minutes max. Linger on it and it feels like a big deal; rush it and you look like you're hiding something. Calm, complete, done.

Beat 1 — Frame it (30 seconds)

"This year, when you write in this class, you're going to use a tool called Red Stet. It looks like a normal document — you write, you save, you turn it in. But while you're writing, it's also quietly keeping a record of how you wrote: the order you typed things in, when you paused, when you came back and revised. We'll talk about why in a second."

Beat 2 — Say why (60 seconds)

"The reason this exists is honestly pretty simple. AI tools like ChatGPT can produce a finished essay that looks fine. There is no reliable way to look at a finished essay and tell whether you wrote it or a machine did. People who tell you there is are selling something. So instead of trying to catch fake work after the fact, this tool lets real work prove itself by leaving a trail."

Beat 3 — Be specific about what's recorded (60 seconds)

"It records keystrokes, pauses, where your cursor is, and when you paste something in — not what you paste, just that you pasted and where. It does not record your screen. It does not see other tabs. It does not turn on your camera or microphone. It is not a surveillance tool. It's a typewriter that remembers."

Beat 4 — Be specific about who sees it (45 seconds)

"I can see it. Anyone helping me run this class — a co-teacher, a TA — can see it. You can see your own recording any time, on your own work. Nobody else can — not other students, not your parents unless you show them, not your future college unless you choose to download your .red.md file and send it to them. It is your record of your effort."

Beat 5 — Close with the offer (30 seconds)

"If anything in your recording ever looks weird to me — a big paste, a strange pause pattern — I'll ask you about it before I make any judgment. The recording is there to start a conversation, not to end one. Questions?"

What to say about why it exists

Students remember the "why" in March. Get it right and the privacy specifics become a footnote; get it wrong and every detail feels sinister.

Frame it as protection, not enforcement. The recording is there so honest students have something to point to. Say it out loud:

"If you do the work, the recording is on your side. It's the receipt for the time you put in. That it also discourages someone from passing off a chatbot's writing — that's a side effect, not the point."

The provenance log is owned by the student. They download their work as a .red.md with the chain embedded, then hand it to anyone — admissions reader, contest judge, employer — who drops it into the verifier. The student is the primary beneficiary. Teachers viewing the recording is the secondary mode.

What to say about what is recorded

Be precise. Older students smell vagueness and assume the worst. Here's what's true:

What is recorded

• Keystroke timing — that a key was pressed and roughly when. The system stores broad buckets (Enter, Tab, Backspace, Delete, or "printable character"), not the literal letters typed as event data.
• Pauses — gaps between actions, so the rhythm of work is visible.
• Cursor position — where the insertion point is in the document, sampled while moving.
• Paste events — that a paste happened, the position in the document, and the length. Not the content. The clipboard is never read.
• Scroll position and focus / visibility — when the student scrolled, when the tab lost or regained focus.

What is not recorded

Read this verbatim. Students assume each item is being recorded; denying each one lands harder than any blanket reassurance:

• No screen recording, no screenshots
• No other browser tabs — Red Stet cannot see them
• No camera, no microphone
• No clipboard contents — paste position and length only
• No search history, no location, no IP tracking beyond standard sign-in
• No device fingerprinting

What to say about who can see it

"Who can see this?" is what students actually care about. Privacy in the abstract bounces off; privacy as an answerable list of people sticks:

• You, their teacher. Any submission in your class.
• Co-teachers and TAs in that specific classroom. Name them when you set the class up.
• The student. Always. They can scrub their own recording on their own work. Most don't expect this, and it reframes the recording as theirs.
• Anyone the student hands a .red.md to. They download from the Archive tab and decide who sees it — parent, contest judge, college reviewer. The file verifies offline through the standalone verifier. Nobody pulls it without the student's explicit download.

That's the whole list. Other students can't see it. Other teachers can't. School administration can't see it casually — they'd need to formally request the records under FERPA, like any other education record.

Common student questions, answered honestly

The questions students actually ask in week one. Answers short on purpose.

"Is this AI detection?"

"No. It doesn't try to guess whether your finished writing was AI. It records how you wrote, period. There's no AI verdict in here."

"Can it see what I'm doing in other tabs?"

"No. It runs inside the Red Stet document and cannot see anything outside it. If you have YouTube open in another tab, it has no idea."

"Does it record what I copy and paste?"

"It records that you pasted and where in the document it landed. It does not see what was on your clipboard. So if you paste a quote from an article, the recording shows 'a paste of 312 characters at position 1,408' — not the actual text."

"What if I'm just slow? Does pausing look bad?"

"No. Long pauses are completely normal — thinking, re-reading, getting a snack. The recording is not a verdict; it's a witness. I read it the way I'd read your notebook: looking for the shape of effort, not for a confession."

"Can my parents see it?"

"Only if you choose to share it with them. They can ask the school for your records the way they can ask for anything else in your file, but the day-to-day recording isn't pushed to them."

"What if I accidentally paste something?"

"Pasting is fine. Pasting a quote you're going to cite is fine. Pasting an entire essay from somewhere else is — well, that's the thing the recording is designed to make visible. You won't be ambushed; if a paste looks worth talking about, I'll ask you about it before I conclude anything."

Addressing student anxiety

Some students hear "we're recording how you write" and tense up — usually the most conscientious ones, worried any unusual pattern reads as suspicious. Name the fear before they have to:

"If you're worrying that your pauses or your typing speed look weird — please don't. There is no normal. Slow writers, fast writers, students who plan in their head, students who think on the page — different rhythms, all fine."

What draws a closer look is specific: a large paste of finished prose, a 90-second session that ends in a 12,000-character document, a session that opens with the essay already typed. Nobody flags "she paused before her conclusion."

Tell them you never mark down based on a recording alone. The recording feeds a conversation. If something looks off, you ask first.

The recording is a witness, not a surveillance tool

Say it in those exact words, more than once, across the term. "Witness, not surveillance." Captures the posture.

Surveillance watches you in case you do something wrong. It exists to catch; its presence is a threat. A witness can speak to what they saw — for you or against you, depending on the truth. A witness protects honest people. A witness is what you want in the room.

Same data, two frames, totally different landings:

• "We're recording your typing so we can catch you" — surveillance. Hostile, adversarial.
• "We're keeping a record of your work so your effort is visible even when the final draft doesn't show it" — witness. Same recording, different relationship.

Pick the second and stay there. When something concerning shows up and you have to bring it up, the frame still holds: "I saw something in the recording I want to ask you about," not "I caught you."

How this reshapes the assignment conversation across the term

Day one is the floor. Every subsequent assignment conversation gets cleaner.

You stop hedging on AI use

Skip the "no AI" warning paragraphs. The assignment can specify the process you want to see. "Draft this in one sitting in the editor" becomes an observable instruction, not an unenforceable guideline.

Revision becomes legible

Heavy revisers get credit. The recording shows strikethroughs, reorderings, second-pass tightenings. Work that used to be invisible now counts.

"Use AI as a tutor, just record it"

If your policy allows AI as a thinking partner but not as a ghostwriter, the recording enforces it. Paste position and length tell you how much was imported and where. Students use the tool freely; you see the boundary they drew.

The "did you write this?" conversation gets shorter

Fewer integrity conversations across a term. The ones that happen become five-minute check-ins instead of multi-week disputes — both parties looking at the same record.

Things to avoid saying

The script avoids claims the product can't back up. Don't drift into any of these — they sound stronger but undercut the trust they're meant to build:

"It can tell if you used AI"

It can't, and doesn't try. Saying this teaches students to distrust both you and the tool the first time someone uses AI and isn't "caught."

"Everything you do in the browser is recorded"

Privacy overclaim. Students will resent it, and it's not what's true.

"This is so I can trust you"

Puts the burden on the student to earn trust by being surveilled. Reverse it: "This is so your work can speak for itself."

"Don't worry about it"

A tool that records you is worth worrying about. Answer with specifics — what it does, what it doesn't, who can see it. Worry dies on specifics, not on dismissal.

"It's just like Google Docs version history"

Not quite. Docs version history records the document; Red Stet records the process. The comparison undersells what's there. Describe Red Stet on its own terms.

Related

→ Reading the provenance recording — what the scrubber shows, how paste flags work, when a recording is reassuring vs. worth a closer look.

→ Co-teachers & TAs — who else gets to see the recordings, and how to set roles deliberately.

→ Setting up your first class — the prerequisite if you haven't built the classroom yet.

→ Back to the help library for more topics.

Got language that worked better with your students? Email feedback — this script grows by use.