Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you - a member of teaching or administrative staff, or a student, with an account - and Youssef Mohamed Hamdy, who operates Distil EDU from Sheikh Zayed, Giza, Egypt.

Where a school, college or tutoring organisation has its own written agreement with the operator, that agreement takes precedence over these terms wherever the two disagree.

You can create a teacher account by continuing with Google. Public registration does not require an invitation. Your verified Google address opens your existing account or creates a new teacher account with its own empty workspace. Administrators can also create accounts, and teachers can invite assistants. There are no platform passwords.

Creating an account or using the service means accepting these terms. The service is intended for teaching and administrative work; public registration does not give access to another teacher's records, and there is no parent portal. You must have authority to use any school or student information you enter. Sign-in and registration are subject to verification, anti-abuse checks and account restrictions; public registration may be limited or suspended.

• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Do not share your Google sign-in, and do not let somebody else work under your account - every mark change is recorded against the account that made it, and an account somebody else was using no longer records anything true.
• Tell an administrator immediately if you think your account has been used by anybody else. Pausing an account blocks further protected requests and is reversible; it cannot erase information already downloaded.
• An administrator may pause or remove an account at any time, typically when somebody leaves. Pausing keeps every class and mark exactly where it is. While a teacher is paused, their students see those classes as paused and cannot use or join them; resuming the teacher restores access.

Where the student portal is available, a student can create a student account by continuing with Google on the student sign-in page; Google is the only way a student signs in. A student account sees nothing until it joins a class: with a personal link or code from the student's teacher, or with the class code a teacher shares with the whole class. A teacher can require that staff approve each student who joins with the class code before they see the class.

• Your student account is yours alone. Do not share it, and do not use an invite or class code meant for somebody else - if a teacher's invite or class code names the wrong class, tell the teacher instead of joining.
• A calendar file you download for a class is a copy. It does not change if the class is rescheduled; check the class page, and remove an old entry from your calendar when you add the new one.
• You see the announcements and materials your teachers publish in the classes you have joined, and you are notified in the app when a new one is published. Do not copy or pass on photos and materials from a class to people outside it.
• When a teacher shows you a homework, you can hand it in here with a written answer and photos or PDF files. Hand in only your own work, and only files you have the right to share with your teacher. A file counts only once you press Hand In: one still uploading when the due time passes does not count, and if your teacher does not accept late work, nothing can be handed in after the due time. Each hand-in is kept as you sent it. You see your mark and your teacher's feedback only after your teacher returns the work. Homework posted to Google Classroom is handed in there.
• Lectures play from your teacher's Google Drive. To watch them you need to sign in with a Google account; your Google email address is then shared with the teacher's video file in Drive, where the teacher can see it. Do not download, record, copy or pass on lectures to anybody outside the class. If you lose access to the class, your access to its videos is removed. “Mark as Completed” is your own note and is not a grade. Use Report a Problem only for real problems with a lecture or material.
• Class materials (your teacher's PDFs) are for your own study. Every copy is stamped with your teacher's name and contact details. Do not share, post or sell them, or try to remove the stamp.
• Ask a Question sends a private question to your teacher and their assistants, not to other students. It is not live chat: your teacher replies when they can. Keep questions about the class, and do not send anything you would not want your teacher to read. Staff can hide a message, and the number of messages you can send is limited. A Class Q&A your teacher publishes may start from the words of your question, edited by them, and is shown to the whole class without your name.
• You never see other students through the platform, and you must not try to find or contact them through it.
• You can change your profile, choose whether others see when you are online, turn on two-step verification and delete your account in Settings. Your teacher keeps their own class records when you leave.
• A student account can be converted into a teacher account once. That ends its class access and cannot be undone.

Signed-in sessions, for staff and students, end after 14 days without use or 60 days in total, by default.

• An assistant does the daily teaching work inside their teacher's classes: students, assignments, marking, rosters, syncing an already-linked Google course and announcements. They cannot create, configure or delete classes, link or unlink Classroom, set grade boundaries, or manage accounts.
• A teacher can do all of that within their own classes, plus create, configure and delete classes, link Classroom, update live sheets, set grade boundaries, decide when and how parents are contacted, and create their own assistants.
• An administrator manages staff accounts, platform statistics and the platform-wide activity log. This role does not grant access to class workspaces or grade sheets. To add a student, an administrator can see a teacher's class names and that class's student names and student codes on the student-invite screen, and nothing else. Activity records can include names of records acted on and action details. Administrators can assign an unassigned class to a teacher, seeing its name and subject for that repair.

One account may hold any combination of administrator, teacher and assistant roles. An assistant is assigned to one teacher; that access does not confer ownership of the teacher's classes. Teachers can manage accounts that serve solely as their assistants, within the account-management safeguards. Administrator access does not itself grant access to teaching workspaces.

You may link Google accounts you control, after proving access to each, to work across your own school workspaces from one login. Only link accounts you are authorised to use together. Each workspace retains its own students, assistants and plan; linking does not give one school's assistants access to another school. Linked accounts do not transfer administrator roles or access to workspaces they merely assist in. You can remove a link in Settings. Deleting a class or unlinking its Classroom course requires signing in as the account that owns it.

Teachers and assistants can invite students into a class; show, reset, turn off or set an expiry on its class code; approve or decline a student who joins with the class code; match a joined student to a record already on the class list; and suspend, end or undo a student's access. An administrator can also issue an invite. Only the teacher who owns the class can unlink a student's account, decide whether students who join with the class code need approval, or switch the student portal on or off for that class.

Teachers and assistants can write, edit, publish and withdraw announcements and materials for a class, with photos. Only the teacher who owns the class can delete one permanently, which also removes its photos from their Google Drive in the background; any removal Google has not yet confirmed is shown to the teacher until it succeeds or the teacher deletes the file themselves.

Teachers and assistants can show a homework to a class's students, read what students hand in, write feedback, give one student a later due time, and return marks and feedback, which students see only after return. Neither can change or delete a student's handed-in work; it is deleted with the homework, the student or the class.

Teachers and assistants can add lectures to a class by uploading a video or choosing one from the teacher's Google Drive (including from a Drive folder linked to the class), organise them into modules, and show, schedule or hide them. Showing a lecture gives the class's approved students view access to that video in the teacher's Drive; hiding it, or removing a student or a lecture, removes that access in the background. Linking a folder does not share it: only the videos you show are shared, and sharing you set up in Drive yourself stays as it is. Only the teacher who owns the class can delete a lecture or module permanently, and the video is deleted from their Drive only if they choose so. You must have the right to share any video you add with your students. Students' problem reports are seen by the class's teacher and assistants.

Teachers and assistants can upload PDF files as class materials. They are stored in the class teacher's own Google Drive and are not shared from Drive: students receive them only through the service, and every copy a student views or downloads is stamped with the teacher's name, the service's name and web address and, if the teacher adds one in Settings, the teacher's phone number and their own watermark text. By adding a phone number or watermark text you agree to it being printed on your class materials, where your students, and anyone they pass a copy to, can see it, and you are responsible for what the text says. Only the teacher who owns the class can delete a material permanently, and the file is deleted from their Drive only if they choose so. You must have the right to share any file you upload with your students.

Students can privately ask a class's teacher and assistants about an announcement, material, lecture or homework, unless the teacher turns questions off for the class or for one item. The teacher and assistants answer from the class's Questions list and can hide a student's message. When you publish a Class Q&A, every student who can see the item reads it. The editor starts from the student's question and your reply: edit both before publishing, and take out a student's name and anything that identifies them or that they would not want shared.

These limits are enforced by the platform, not merely suggested by it. Attempting to work around them - by calling the platform directly, or by using somebody else's account - is a breach of these terms.

You agree not to:

• enter information about a student you have no legitimate reason to hold, or use a parent's contact details for anything other than contacting them about that child's work;
• attempt to reach class data you are not authorised to access, or to probe, scan or interfere with the platform's security;
• upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to store - including, in a class announcement or material, a photo of a student or of anyone else's personal information that every student in the class is not meant to see;
• use the platform to send parents messages that are not about their child's schooling - it is not a marketing channel;
• invite a student into a class they do not belong to, approve a student into a class they do not belong to, or pass a student's invite or a class's code to anybody other than the students of that class or their families.

Distil EDU calculates. It does not decide. T-scores, quartiles, at-risk flags, grade boundaries and every statistic on screen are tools to inform your judgement, and the grade a student receives is awarded by you.

You are responsible for the accuracy of what you enter and for checking what the platform produces before it is acted on, sent home, or handed to a school. The operator gives no warranty that a calculated figure is fit for any particular assessment, syllabus or awarding body, and does not replace your professional review. Any limitation of liability is subject to section 11 and applicable law.

The platform proposes who might be worth contacting. It never sends anything on its own: a member of staff reviews the list on a confirmation screen, can remove anybody from it, and only then does anything go out.

• You are responsible for having a lawful basis - and any consent your school requires - before a family is contacted.
• A message cannot be unsent. Neither WhatsApp route offers a recall, and the platform does not claim to provide one.
• On the automated route, delivery is Meta's. Their approval of a message template, their delivery, and their quality limits are theirs to control, and the operator cannot guarantee any of them.
• A student record can be opted out of alerts until staff change that setting. Honouring a request to stop contacting a family is your responsibility as their teacher.

The manual route prepares a WhatsApp chat; you must send it in WhatsApp and confirm the alert afterwards. That confirmation is not a delivery receipt. On the API route, provider acceptance does not prove that a parent received or read the message. An unconfigured dry run sends nothing. A report shared separately through WhatsApp is also sent by you.

Student pages are published on your authority too. Turning them on for a class, sharing a student's link and returning marks to families are your decisions. You confirm, when turning pages on, that families have been told and that your school's consent covers it. A page is visible to anyone holding its link, including anyone a family forwards it to; switch a student's page off or replace the link if it reaches somebody it should not.

Linking a class to Google Classroom is optional. When you link one, you grant Distil EDU permission to act on your behalf within the permissions you approve, and your use of Google's services remains subject to Google's own terms.

While a class is linked, its Classroom announcements and materials are copied into the class's announcements and materials, read-only, through the class owner's connection, including by a background job; attachments appear as links, and nothing is downloaded or re-shared. Edit them in Classroom; in Distil EDU you can only hide a copy from students. Unlinking withdraws the copies from students. Students whose Google account is on the course's class list may be offered a one-tap Join, which follows the class's approval setting. Neither asks students for any Google permission.

For a class owned by a linked account, Google actions use that owning account's connection. Files and live sheets are created in that account's Drive. Check the school and account before publishing, returning marks or sharing files. Removing an account link stops shared workspace access; it does not revoke Google permissions or delete data.

Photos added to class announcements and materials are stored in the class teacher's Google Drive, through that teacher's connection, including when an assistant adds them, and count towards that teacher's Drive storage. Distil EDU never shares them from Drive; students see them only inside the app, after an access check. If the teacher disconnects Google, photos stop loading until they reconnect.

Lecture videos stay in the class teacher's Google Drive. Unlike photos and homework, Distil EDU shares each published lecture video from that Drive with the class's approved students (as viewers, by their Google email address) and removes that sharing when they lose access; it never removes sharing it did not add. Google may limit how quickly files can be shared, and a school's Google Workspace may refuse shares from outside it; then access can be delayed or fail, and staff are shown why. Viewing in Google Drive is subject to Google's terms, and copies a viewer already made cannot be recalled.

Photos and files students hand in for homework are stored the same way, in the class teacher's Google Drive through that teacher's connection, and count towards that teacher's Drive storage. If the teacher disconnects Google, students cannot add files to homework (they can still hand in a written answer) and handed-in files stop loading until the teacher reconnects.

Sync works in both directions: rosters, coursework and submission states can be imported, while assignments, announcements and returned marks can be sent to Google. Refreshes can happen when you sign in, open a class or export. Manual submission overrides and corrected names can take precedence over imports. Check sync results: permissions, network failures and Google restrictions can leave the two systems out of step. Saving a gradebook draft does not return it to Classroom.

Update Live Sheet can also publish a Grades material to a linked Classroom course as part of the same action. Included names, marks and hand-in information become visible to the course, and future sheet updates replace the contents at the same link. This is described in full in the Privacy Policy, and using the feature is your decision to make on your school's behalf.

Review the export selections and obtain any authority and permissions needed for class-wide disclosure before updating the sheet. A privacy notice alone does not authorise sharing classmates' results. Manage existing file access in Google Drive as well as the Classroom post; unlinking or deleting a class here does not recall external copies.

The operator aims to keep Distil EDU running and working, but provides it as is and does not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at any particular moment.

Planned maintenance, provider outages and failures at Google, Cloudflare, Meta, the database or the hosting provider can interrupt the service. If the sign-in security check is unavailable, new sign-ins may be blocked.

Phone notifications are a convenience, not a guarantee: they depend on your browser, your device's settings and its push service, and may arrive late, more than once, or not at all. The bell in the app is the record of what was sent to you.

Do not rely on Distil EDU as the only copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Marks can be exported to a spreadsheet at any time, and before a deadline that matters, they should be.

You and your organisation retain your rights in the material you provide and authorise the operator to process it to deliver the service. This does not limit students' or parents' rights over their personal information. What is stored, who it is shared with and how long it is kept is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

Deleting a class deletes its students, marks and hand-in records, including homework handed in on Distil EDU and its files, and its announcements and materials with their photos (the copies in the teacher's Google Drive are removed in the background and retried until Google confirms, as described above). The record of who changed which mark is deliberately kept, so that a disputed grade can still be investigated afterwards. Critical activity records also remain. Deleting one student does not remove their previous parent-alert records; deleting the class removes those alert records. Removing a staff account is separate from removing class data, and a teacher account with classes or assistants cannot be deleted until those dependencies are resolved. See the Privacy Policy for retention limits and requests that need the operator's help.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data or lost profit, or for any decision taken on the basis of a figure the platform calculated.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

These terms may be updated. The date at the top of this page changes when they are, and a material change will be communicated to account holders and affected schools rather than left to be noticed. Continuing to use Distil EDU after a change means accepting it.

You may stop using the platform at any time and ask an administrator to remove your account, or contact the operator directly. A student can delete their own account in Settings. The operator may suspend an account that breaches these terms.

During the current launch period, workspaces receive Center features without an online payment unless an administrator has assigned a different plan. Online payments are not yet enabled. Creating or linking an account does not itself authorise a charge, and launch access is not a promise of permanent free access to every feature. Prices and payment terms will be presented before any future purchase.

Plan limits apply to the workspace where work is performed. The service counts active students by term and enforces applicable student and assistant limits, including during launch. Deleting and recreating records does not ordinarily reset usage. An assigned plan or usage limit can restrict adding students, creating classes or entering marks. Linking school accounts does not combine their plans or usage allowances.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and disputes are subject to the competent courts in Egypt, subject to any mandatory rights or rules that applicable law does not permit these terms to exclude.

Questions about these terms go to privacy@distiledu.com.