AI for Teachers
The honest version of AI for teaching: it is very good at producing the materials around a lesson and mediocre at anything requiring judgement about a particular child. Planning, differentiation, worksheets, slides and the endless admin are where the time comes back. Marking is where people expect the most and get the least.
Planning and resources
First drafts of the things that eat a Sunday. Nothing here produces a lesson you would teach unedited, but it removes the blank page, which is most of the work.
- ChatGPTFREEMIUM~$20/mo
The workhorse. Differentiated versions of the same worksheet at three reading levels, in the time it takes to ask.
- ClaudeFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Better than most at long, structured documents — a scheme of work or a unit plan rather than a single activity.
- GammaFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Lesson slides from a text outline in about a minute, and they look designed rather than defaulted.
- CanvaFREEMIUM~$15/mo
Worksheets, displays and knowledge organisers that look right. Free for educators, which makes it close to essential.
- Notion AIFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Somewhere to keep schemes of work that you can then question in plain English instead of hunting through folders.
Explaining, tutoring and practice
Tools that work through a problem rather than answering it. Several of these are student-facing, which matters — knowing what your class is already using is half the reason to look at them.
- KhanmigoPAID~$4/mo
Built to guide rather than answer, which is the only tutoring behaviour that is any use in a classroom. Cheap, and designed for schools.
- Wolfram AlphaFREEMIUM~$7/mo
Computes and shows working reliably, which general chatbots still do not for anything beyond routine arithmetic.
- SymbolabFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Step-by-step algebra and calculus solutions — good for building worked examples quickly.
- QuizletFREEMIUM~$8/mo
Retrieval practice sets from your own material, with the class already knowing how to use it.
- SocraticFREE$0
What your students are using on their phones. Worth understanding for that reason alone.
- SpeakFREE TRIAL~$20/mo
Speaking practice for language classes, which is the part of MFL that class size makes impossible.
Feedback, marking and writing
Where expectations need managing. AI is useful for the mechanics of feedback and for your own writing; it cannot mark to a rubric with the reliability you would need to stand behind a grade.
- GrammarlyFREEMIUM~$12/mo
Fast, consistent surface-level correction — and useful modelled feedback for students on mechanics.
- QuillBotFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Rewrites a text at a different reading level, which is the quickest route to a differentiated version of a source.
- Otter.aiFREEMIUM~$17/mo
Transcribes parents' evenings and meetings so you have a record without writing during the conversation.
- PhotomathFREEMIUM~$10/mo
Listed so you know it exists: point a phone at a maths question and get the answer with steps. Plan homework accordingly.
Admin and the rest of the workload
Reports, emails, letters, rotas. Not teaching, and a large fraction of the hours.
- ZapierFREEMIUM~$30/mo
Automates the repetitive forwarding and logging between school systems that nobody is paid to do.
- MotionPAID~$34/mo
Fits marking and prep into the gaps a timetable leaves, and re-plans when a cover lesson lands.
- GeminiFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Free tier is generous and it sits inside Google Workspace, which is what most schools already run on.
- Microsoft CopilotFREEMIUM~$20/mo
The equivalent if your school is a Microsoft school. Included in some education tenancies already — check before buying anything.
AI text detectors produce false positives at a rate that makes them unsafe as evidence, and they misfire more often on students writing in a second language. Accusing a child on a detector score is indefensible; if you suspect AI use, look at drafting history and talk to the student. Second, student data: names, assessment records and anything about a child's needs should not go into a consumer AI subscription — your school's DPA governs this and consumer tiers are not covered. Third, everything these tools produce contains errors at a low but real rate, including in maths and in factual content. Read it before it reaches thirty children.
How to pick AI tools as a teacher
Check what your school already pays for first. If you are a Google school, Gemini is in the Workspace you already have; if you are a Microsoft school, Copilot may already be in your tenancy. A surprising number of teachers pay personally for a tool their trust has already licensed, and the licensed version is usually the one that is actually approved for use with school data.
Then aim at preparation rather than assessment. The reliable wins are differentiation, resource production, slides and admin — jobs where you are the editor and the output is a draft. Marking is the opposite: the model cannot see the child, does not hold your rubric consistently across thirty scripts, and produces feedback that reads plausible and lands generic. Use it for the phrasing of feedback you have already decided on, not for deciding it.
Assume everything needs reading. Generated worksheets contain wrong answers, invented quotations and the occasional confidently incorrect date. The time saved is real, but it is the time you spent writing, not the time you spend checking.
Prices on this page are per month for one person at normal use. Canva is free for educators, Gemini and ChatGPT have free tiers that cover most planning work, and Khanmigo is a few pounds — the sensible starting spend on this page is zero.
AI for teachers: common questions
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