Accounts & sharing

PianoKitty connects teachers, students, families and friends. This page explains what each kind of account and connection is — and exactly who can see what.

Account types

• Regular account — created with an email address. Everyone has the same account type; there is no separate "teacher account".
• Teacher is a role you get by being connected: whoever has accepted students is a teacher. Your My teaching page fills the moment the first student accepts.
• Kid account — a managed account for a child without an email address, created by a parent (or a teacher on the parent's behalf) on the Family page. It logs in with a special login id like kot482 instead of an email. See kid accounts.

Who sees what

Connections are directional and each kind shares a fixed, limited slice of your practice data — nothing more:

• A teacher sees everything about their students: detailed stats, practice sessions and exercise history.
• A parent sees a weekly summary and the activity feed — not detailed stats. Exception: for a managed kid account the parent sees full detail (they own the account).
• Friends only see each other's activity feed.
• Students and children looking "up" see nothing extra about their teacher or parent — just the public profile.

The live version of this table is on your People page — it is generated from the same rules the server enforces.

Invitations

1. Open People → Invite someone, pick who the person is (each choice shows what they will see), enter their email.
2. The recipient gets an email link and — if they already use PianoKitty — a dashboard notification. Either place works to accept or decline.
3. Someone without an account signs up directly from the invitation link; the connection activates the moment the account is created.
4. Invitation links expire after 14 days. You can withdraw a pending invitation any time from People → Pending → Sent.
5. Either side can end an active connection later (People → the person's tab → End) — the other person is not notified, data access simply stops.
6. How you hear about all of this — invitation emails, dashboard notifications, push, practice reminders — is yours to set in Preferences → Notifications, including turning any of it off.

Kid accounts

• Created on the Family page with just a name and a password — no email needed. Up to 5 kid accounts per parent.
• The kid logs in with the generated login id (like kot482) typed into the email field, plus the password. Save both at creation — the password is shown only once (a parent can set a new one any time from the child's page).
• A kid account starts with kid-friendly defaults (playful theme, game mode, cat rewards) and a first exercise ready to play on first login.
• The creating parent is connected automatically — no invitation, and full visibility of the kid's practice. A teacher who creates a kid for an already-connected parent is connected as its teacher too.

Creating an account for somebody else's child

A teacher can set a child up at the lesson and hand the account to the parent afterwards. Fill in the parent's email on the same create form: the account is made under your management, the child is listed as your student, and an invitation goes to that address.

• When the parent accepts, the child moves into their care — they become the guardian, with full visibility — and you convert from stand-in guardian to the child's teacher, so lessons carry on uninterrupted.
• Until they accept, nothing changes: the child simply stays with you. The same is true if the invitation expires or is declined.
• The login id and password travel in that first email, because they can only be shared while you still hold them — the password is stored hashed and cannot be read back afterwards. Hand over an existing account and the parent is told to ask whoever set it up.
• One handover per account: once a child has moved, an older invitation for it stops working.