Hi there!

You're not required to work for a public school to create a teacher account or use the teacher tools. Anyone can create a teacher account and use our classroom tools.

I believe what you're referring to is the account setting that asks you to verify whether or not you are "a teacher using this service on behalf of a school [and] understand and agree to comply with requirements for approving student accounts". This allows you to create and modify accounts for your students (rather than having them create and manage their own accounts), but this is only necessary if the students are under 13 (in which case they need parent or teacher consent to create an account).

If your students are under 13, you are still able to enable this setting (with some stipulations) and create accounts for them. However, I encourage you to read section 1.6 of our Terms of Service for more information on this before doing so.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

So what should I put when it asks me what school I work for?  If I don't put anything, I can't select the box saying that I am a teacher using the service on behalf of a school.  Also, can I create student accounts even if the student is over 13?  

If you don't work for an actual school, then you should be able to skip that step. You can then enable the student account management features via your Account Settings page by checking the box under the Teacher Confirmation section.

If the students are older than 13 you can still create accounts for them, but they will be able to manage their own account settings. In this case, you don't really need to worry about listing a school or completing the teacher confirmation, since you won't be able to manage their account settings anyways (teachers can't do this for 13+ users).