Privacy Policy

Teach Different, Inc. runs teachdifferent.com, a weekly podcast, an online community for educators, and training programs for schools. This policy explains what happens to information about you when you use any of that.

Two things are worth saying at the top, because they are the questions people actually have. We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. And our services are for adults, specifically teachers, school administrators and others who work in education. They are not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Section 1Who we are

Teach Different, Inc. is an education company based in Illinois. In this policy, "we", "us" and "Teach Different" mean Teach Different, Inc. "You" means anyone who visits our website, subscribes to our email, joins our community, registers for a workshop, or contacts us.

For anyone reading this under European or United Kingdom data protection law, Teach Different, Inc. is the data controller for the information described here.

Section 2What we collect

Information you give us

Almost everything we hold about you is something you typed into a form and pressed send on. That includes:

• Contact details. Your name, email address, and, if you choose to give them, your phone number, job title, and the school, district or organization you work for.
• What you told us you need. The message you wrote, the topic you picked from a dropdown, the number of educators you said you have.
• Registration details for a workshop or webinar, including the sessions you signed up for and whether you attended.
• Community activity if you join our online community: your profile, your posts and comments, and your progress through a course.
• Payment information if you buy a membership or a program. We do not receive or store your full card number. Our payment processor handles the card and tells us only that the payment succeeded, along with the last four digits and the expiry date for your own reference.

Information collected automatically

• Standard web log data. Your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you looked at, the page you came from, and the date and time. Every website receives this simply by being visited.
• Analytics and marketing cookies. Described in section 6.
• Email engagement. Whether you opened a message from us and which links you clicked, so we can tell what is worth sending and stop sending what is not.

What we deliberately do not collect

We do not ask for, and do not want, information about individual students. See section 5.

Section 3Why we use it

Grant and funder reporting is done with counts and aggregates, such as how many educators in a county completed a workshop. It does not name you.

Section 4The companies that help us run this

We are a small organization and we use established services rather than building our own. Each one sees only what it needs to do its job. Each is bound by its own privacy commitments, and we have listed them so you can go and read those if you want to.

We may change providers. When we do, we update this list.

Section 5Children and student information

Our website and services are not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to [email protected] and we will delete it.

Our method is used with students in classrooms, and teachers sometimes tell us how a conversation went. When you share a classroom story with us, in a workshop, in the community, or in an email, please describe what happened without naming the student. If you send us student work, remove the names first. If we receive student information we did not ask for, we delete it.

If your school or district ever needs a written agreement covering student data before working with us, including under the Illinois Student Online Personal Protection Act or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, contact us and we will work through it with you.

Section 6Cookies and analytics

A cookie is a small file a website leaves in your browser so it can recognise you on your next visit. We use them for three things:

• Making the site work. Remembering that you submitted a form, for example, so you are not shown it again on the next page.
• Google Analytics. Counting visits and seeing which pages people read. This tells us that 40 people read the Method page yesterday. It does not tell us who they were.
• HubSpot. Connecting a form you filled in to the pages you looked at before filling it in, so that when you write to us we have some idea what you were reading.

You can refuse or delete cookies in your browser settings. The site will still work. Some browsers send a Global Privacy Control signal, and where the law requires us to honour it, we do.

Section 7How long we keep things

Newsletter subscribers

Until you unsubscribe, and then a minimal record that you did, so we do not add you back by mistake.

Enquiries and form submissions

Three years from your last contact with us, then deleted.

Customer and school records

Seven years after the working relationship ends, which is what our accounting and grant obligations require.

Community accounts

For as long as your membership is active. Close your account and the content is removed on the platform's schedule.

Website analytics

Fourteen months, then automatically discarded.

Section 8Who else sees your information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not rent or trade email lists. We share it in four situations only:

• The services in section 4, so they can do the job we hired them for.
• Our own team and contractors, including the facilitators who deliver workshops, and only what they need to deliver them.
• Funders and accreditation partners, in aggregate. If a grant requires proof that we trained 300 teachers, we report the number. Where a funder requires named attendance records for a program they paid for, we tell you before you register for that program.
• When the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety. If we are ever compelled to hand over your information, we will tell you unless we are legally forbidden from doing so.

If Teach Different is ever sold or merged, your information may transfer with the business. If that happens, it stays subject to this policy until you are told otherwise, and you will be told.

Section 9Your choices and your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to do all of the following, and we will do it:

• See what we hold about you.
• Correct it if it is wrong.
• Delete it, apart from anything we are legally required to keep.
• Stop the email. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and it works immediately.
• Get a copy in a form you can take elsewhere.

Write to [email protected]. We answer within two business days and complete the request within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you also have the right to object to processing, to ask us to restrict it, and to complain to your national data protection authority. If you are in California, you have the rights described above and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them; we have no personal information to sell, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Section 10Security

Connections to our site are encrypted. Access to our records is limited to the people who need it and protected by two-factor authentication. The services we use are established providers with their own security programs.

Nobody can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects your personal information, we will tell you and the relevant authorities as quickly as the law requires and as quickly as we can.

Section 11Where your information is processed

We are based in the United States and our information is generally processed there. Some of our providers store data elsewhere; our customer records are held on servers in the European Union. If you are outside the United States, using our services means your information may be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have different data protection laws than your own country. Where such a transfer is subject to European or United Kingdom law, it is made under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

Section 12Changes to this policy

When we change this policy we change the effective date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use information we already hold about you, we will tell you by email before it takes effect rather than quietly editing the page.

Section 13How to reach us

For anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete what we hold:

Teach Different, Inc.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (708) 669-4647

We reply within two business days.