01
A teacher starts a session
A teacher opens Anchor and starts a focus session for the class, choosing the allowlist of apps and websites that lesson needs.
Classroom focus, while a lesson lasts — and not a minute longer.
Anchor lets a teacher start a focus session for a class. For its duration each student's device softly keeps to a teacher-defined allowlist, and off-task activity surfaces live on the teacher's dashboard. Made by teachers, free and open source for everyone.
What Anchor is
02
Devices keep to the allowlist
For the session's duration, each signed-in student's device softly enforces that allowlist. Off-list apps get pushed to the background; off-list pages show a friendly block page.
03
Off-task activity surfaces live
When a device drifts off task, it shows up on the teacher's dashboard in real time — so the teacher can quietly nudge a student back, not police a log later.
No monitoring, no surveillance
Soft enforcement: off-task is made visible, not impossible
Anchor is built for soft enforcement. The agent pulls focus back and surfaces off-list activity, but it does not pretend to be tamper-proof — a motivated student can defeat it, and that is by design. The goal is to make off-task behaviour visible to the teacher, not impossible.
Nothing is recorded between sessions. Anchor only observes activity while a teacher has a session running, and only the off-list parts; on-allowlist work is never logged. We are honest about who is in control: a teacher set this up, it ends when the lesson ends, and the data stays inside the school that runs it.
How it works
A teacher starts a session from the dashboard. The backend pushes it to every signed-in student device over a realtime channel; each device enforces the allowlist locally and reports off-list activity straight back to the dashboard. Five small components do the work:
Agent
A native Windows tray app on each student laptop. It joins the session, gently pulls focus back from off-list apps, and shows the block overlay.
Edge extension
Filters URLs inside Edge against the session allowlist and shows a friendly block page for off-list pages.
Witness
A native-messaging bridge so the agent and extension watch each other: if either is disabled mid-session, the other reports it.
Dashboard
The teacher's web instrument: start and stop sessions, manage classes and allowlists, and watch live student state.
Backend
Each school self-hosts its own backend. It relays sessions to devices and stores classes, allowlists, and session events — and nothing else.
Free & open source
Made by teachers, free for everyone
Anchor is GPL-3.0 licensed and self-hostable. Each school runs its own backend; Plink Labs operates none and receives no student data. The full source — including exactly what each component collects — is public and auditable.