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Session replay lets you watch a student’s document build itself from a blank page to the final submission, reconstructing every keystroke, paste, deletion, and revision in the order they occurred. Rather than inferring how a document was written from a static summary, you can observe the writing process directly — at full speed, slowed down, or by skipping straight to moments of interest.

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What session replay shows

Replay reconstructs the document’s full creation history by playing back the event record Puddin captured during writing. As you watch, you see:
  • Characters appearing and disappearing as the student typed and deleted
  • Paste events rendered in a distinct highlight so you can see exactly what content arrived via paste and where in the document it landed
  • Cursor movements and selection activity showing where the student was working at each moment
  • Writing bursts and pauses reflected in the real-time pace of the replay
  • Session boundaries marked clearly so you can distinguish between separate writing sessions
  • Revision sequences — deletions and rewrites playing out in sequence
Session replay reconstructs document state from the event log. It shows what happened during the writing process, not a screen recording. The document view is always accurate to the event record, but UI elements outside the writing area (such as browser tabs or external applications) are not captured.

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Start a replay

1

Open the submission

Navigate to Assignments, select the relevant assignment, and click the student’s name to open their submission.
2

Select Session Replay

From the submission view, click the Replay tab in the top navigation bar. The replay player opens with the document at its initial state (empty) and the playhead set to the beginning of the first writing session.
3

Press Play

Click the Play button (▶) to begin the replay. The document populates in real time as the event record plays back. The timeline bar at the bottom of the player advances as replay progresses.

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Playback controls

Use the controls below the replay window to manage playback.
For long documents, start with a 5× or 10× replay to get an overall sense of the writing trajectory, then use the events list to jump back to specific moments for closer examination.

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Jumping to key moments

The Events panel to the right of the replay window lists every significant event in the writing record, timestamped and categorised. Event types include:
  • 🔵 Typing bursts — sustained periods of direct keyboard input
  • 🟡 Paste events — content entered via paste (Ctrl+V or equivalent)
  • 🔴 Large deletions — removal of 50 or more characters in a single action
  • ⚪ Pauses — gaps in activity longer than 2 minutes
  • 🟣 Session breaks — the student closed or left the writing environment and returned later
Click any event in the list to jump the playhead to that moment. The document display updates immediately to show the exact state at that point, and replay resumes from there.

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Viewing revisions during replay

When the replay reaches a revision sequence — where the student deleted and rewrote text — the player highlights the affected passage. Deleted characters are shown in a muted red strikethrough before disappearing, and new characters appear in the normal typing colour. This makes it easy to distinguish organic editing from abrupt replacements.
A high frequency of small revisions is a normal characteristic of engaged writing. Look for context rather than volume — revisions that refine phrasing are different in character from large blocks of text being deleted and replaced wholesale.

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Viewing paste events during replay

When the replay reaches a paste event, the inserted content appears highlighted in amber. The Paste Events panel (accessible from the tab bar in the main submission view) shows the full content of every paste alongside its position in the document and the timestamp — useful context when you want to understand the origin of a particular passage.
Puddin records that a paste occurred and captures the pasted content, but it does not identify the source of pasted material. Determining whether pasted content is quoted, paraphrased, self-sourced, or otherwise appropriate is a matter of your academic judgement.