How to Hide Student Names and Grades During Online Classes and Tutoring Sessions

A high school teacher I know recently told me a story that stuck with me. She was doing a live Zoom class with about thirty students. She needed to pull up the class gradebook in Canvas to show a student where to find their assignment feedback. She shared her screen, navigated to the gradebook, and for about five seconds, the entire class saw every student's name next to their current grade percentage.

The reactions were immediate. Students started messaging each other. A parent emailed the principal that evening. The teacher—who had been teaching for fifteen years and had an impeccable record—spent the next week writing incident reports and attending meetings with the school's privacy officer.

The irony is that she was trying to help a student. She was doing the right thing by showing them how to access their feedback. But the tool she was using (Canvas) wasn't designed for public viewing. It's designed for teachers, and teachers need to see everyone's grades. The problem isn't the tool—it's the context. A screen that's perfectly appropriate for a teacher's private use becomes a privacy violation the moment it's shared with students.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

If you're a teacher, a private tutor, or an educational content creator, student privacy isn't just an ethical consideration—it's a legal obligation.

In the United States, FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) protects the privacy of student education records. This includes grades, disciplinary records, and personally identifiable information. Sharing a student's grades with other students—even accidentally—is a FERPA violation. The consequences can include loss of federal funding for the institution, formal complaints, and damage to your professional reputation.

In the EU, student data is protected under GDPR. In the UK, it's covered by the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act. In Canada, PIPEDA applies. The specifics vary, but the principle is universal: student data is sensitive, and exposing it without authorization is a breach.

And this isn't just about grades. Student names themselves can be sensitive. In a tutoring context, if you're working with minors, exposing a student's full name during a group session or a recorded video can raise safeguarding concerns. Parents have a right to control whether their child's name is visible in educational recordings.

The Unique Challenges of Online Education

Online education introduces privacy challenges that simply don't exist in physical classrooms. In a physical classroom, the gradebook is a physical object that sits on the teacher's desk. No student can see it unless they walk up and look over the teacher's shoulder. The privacy is architectural.

In an online classroom, the gradebook is a web page. And when you share your screen, every pixel of that web page is broadcast to every student in the session—and potentially recorded by the video conferencing platform. The architectural privacy is gone, and nothing replaces it by default.

This problem is compounded by several factors:

• LMS platforms aren't designed for screen sharing. Canvas, Blackboard, Google Classroom, and Moodle are designed for teachers' private use. They show all students' data simultaneously because that's what teachers need for their work. They don't have a "presentation mode" that hides other students' information.
• Students record everything. Even if you don't officially record the session, students often screen-record classes for their own reference. If a privacy breach happens during a live session, it's likely captured somewhere.
• Group tutoring sessions are especially risky. If you're a private tutor working with multiple students, each student's parent expects that their child's information isn't visible to other students. But your tutoring dashboard might show all your students' names, progress, and grades in a single view.

Solutions That Actually Work

1. Use "Student View" (When Available)

Most LMS platforms have a "Student View" or "Test Student" mode that shows you the platform as a generic student sees it. This hides the instructor-only grading panels and roster lists. Always switch to Student View before sharing your screen.

The limitation is that Student View doesn't let you access admin features. If you need to show a student how to check their grade, Student View won't show real grades—it shows a test student's fake data. This means you might need to exit Student View to show the real information, which brings you right back to the privacy problem.

2. Prepare Materials in Advance

Instead of navigating your LMS live during a class, take screenshots of the specific (non-sensitive) screens you want to show and paste them into your presentation slides. This gives you complete control over what's visible.

This works well for planned lessons, but it falls apart during Q&A or when a student asks an unexpected question that requires you to pull up the LMS in real-time. Teaching is inherently unpredictable, and overly rigid preparation kills the interactive quality that makes online classes effective.

3. Browser-Level Redaction

The most flexible solution is to make the LMS itself safe to show by applying persistent visual redactions to the elements that contain other students' data.

Privacy extensions like BlurTab allow you to blur specific columns, rows, or elements on any web page. You set it up once, and the blur persists every time you visit that page.

For Educational Content Creators

If you create educational content on YouTube, Udemy, or Coursera—or if you stream educational content on Twitch—the privacy stakes are different but equally important.

Educational streamers often use real-world examples to teach. A coding instructor might show a real Stripe dashboard. A marketing teacher might show a real Google Analytics account. A business tutor might show a real QuickBooks setup. In each case, the platform contains real data from real clients or businesses.

The audience for a YouTube tutorial or a Twitch stream can be thousands or millions of people. A privacy leak in this context isn't a FERPA violation—it's a public data exposure that can't be taken back. Once a video is uploaded, it's potentially permanent.

For educational content creators, persistent blur rules are particularly valuable because they protect you across every recording session without any additional setup. You configure your privacy rules once, and every video you record going forward is automatically protected.

Making It Part of Your Teaching Workflow

The key to sustainable privacy practices is to make them invisible. If protecting student data requires extra steps before every class, those steps will eventually be skipped. The best approach is:

1. Set up your blur rules once at the beginning of the semester. Spend fifteen minutes blurring the student name and grade columns in your LMS.
2. Let them persist automatically. BlurTab remembers your rules, so every time you open your gradebook—whether it's during a class or during your own private grading session—the blurs are already in place.
3. Unblur selectively when needed. During your private grading time, you can temporarily disable the blurs to see everything clearly. When it's time for class, the blurs reactivate.

Conclusion

As educators, we have a duty of care that extends beyond the curriculum. Our students trust us with their personal information, their academic records, and—in the case of minors—their safety. Screen sharing has made teaching more accessible and more interactive, but it's also introduced privacy risks that our physical classrooms never had.

The solution isn't to stop sharing screens. It's to make our screens safe to share. With the right tools and a few minutes of initial setup, you can teach freely, demonstrate openly, and know that every student's privacy is protected.

Get started with BlurTab and make your next class a model of privacy-conscious teaching.