About RosterOwl

RosterOwl is a set of free classroom tools that share one class list. Paste your roster once, then use it for seating charts, groups, name tags, certificates and the rest — without it ever leaving your browser.

Why it exists

Every teacher rebuilds the same class list over and over — once in the seating chart tool, again in a group generator, again in a spreadsheet for the attendance grid, again when the substitute needs a copy. The list is the same every time. Only the piece of paper changes.

So RosterOwl is built the other way around: the roster is the thing you own, and the 10 tools are just different ways of printing it. Set up your room and your keep-apart rules once, and every tool already knows about them.

Who makes it

RosterOwl is built and run by KNG Technologies, a small independent software studio. It isn't venture-funded, it isn't a side project of a bigger edtech platform, and it has no sales team who will call your district. It's one team shipping tools for a job we think is badly served.

You can reach a human — the address goes to the people who write the code, not to a ticket queue.

How it's free

There are no ads, no trackers, no email wall, and no "free for 30 students" ceiling. There is no paid tier today. If one ever appears it will be for extras — premium certificate designs, opt-in cloud sync — and the tools that are free today stay free and uncapped. That's a commitment, not a promotion.

Student data, FERPA and COPPA

This section is here for the person in your district who has to sign off on new tools. The short version:

There is exactly one exception, and a teacher has to go and switch it on: sync. If a teacher signs in with a Google account, the class list they have typed is stored on our infrastructure (a Cloudflare database) so they can continue on a second computer. That copy is ordinary text, so it is readable by us in principle; it can be deleted by the teacher at any time from the sync menu, and deleting it leaves their own device untouched.

So the FERPA answer depends on which of those two states your staff use, and we would rather set that out plainly than give you a single sentence that is only true half the time. With sync off, no education record reaches us, there is nothing for us to disclose, and no retention period to negotiate. With sync on, we hold the class list a teacher chose to upload — names only, never absences, tags or notes — for as long as they keep the account, and we delete it on request or when they press the button themselves. Under COPPA we collect no information from children directly in either state; the only account RosterOwl ever creates belongs to an adult teacher.

If your district's answer is "no cloud storage of student names", that is a supported configuration rather than a refusal: tell your staff not to sign in, and every tool still works exactly as documented.

We would rather you verified that than took our word for it. Our privacy page lists every network request the site makes and walks you through checking it yourself in about two minutes — including the part where you turn your Wi-Fi off and the tools keep working.

If your district needs this in a particular form — a completed vendor questionnaire, a signed data-privacy agreement, a statement on letterhead — ask us. We'd rather fill in the form than lose you to a procurement checkbox.

Accessibility

The interface is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface designed by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision. Every control is reachable by keyboard, the whole site works with a screen reader, there's a dark theme for projector-lit rooms, and motion respects your system's reduced-motion setting. If something doesn't work with your setup, that's a bug — please tell us.

What's next

The suite grows in the direction the stored roster makes better. Substitute binders, more certificate occasions, and offline install are on the list. Things that don't touch the class list — behavior analytics, gradebooks, parent messaging — are deliberately not.