MagicSchool AI: start here
My first go‑to for education. The widest set of teacher‑facing generators in one place: rubrics, item banks, IEP‑aligned supports, parent emails, text leveling. If you’ve never used an AI tool as a teacher, open this one.
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Free · for teachers & preservice teachers
Tools I actually recommend.
My advice is to use both: a general‑purpose tool you know well, plus something built for your field. For education, MagicSchool is my first stop. And go back and try things again: these tools change constantly, and the one that disappointed you in March may be the one you rely on by fall.
ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini
The general‑purpose assistants. Know at least one well: most education‑specific tools are built on top of these, and understanding the base makes everything else make sense.
Diffit
Takes any article, topic, or text and rewrites it at the reading level you choose, with vocabulary and questions attached. Genuinely useful for content‑area differentiation.
Brisk Teaching
A browser extension that works inside Google Docs and Classroom. Strongest for feedback on student writing and for seeing a document’s revision history.
NotebookLM
Upload your own sources and ask questions grounded only in them. Excellent for course reading and literature reviews, and the citations make it teachable.
SchoolAI
Build student‑facing chat spaces with guardrails and a live teacher dashboard. A sound structure for letting students use AI directly while you can still see what’s happening.
Canva for Education
Free for verified educators, with AI generation built in. Slides, handouts, infographics, and video without a design background.
Curipod & Nearpod
Interactive lessons with live polls and formative checks. Curipod builds a lesson from a prompt; Nearpod goes deeper if your school already has it.
Quizizz & Blooket
Retrieval practice students will do willingly. Both generate question sets from your own material, which removes the setup cost that kills most good intentions.
Perusall
Turns assigned reading into a social annotation activity. The best answer I’ve found to “did anyone do the reading?” in a college course.
Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
The clearest ongoing writing on staying the human in the loop and keeping up with what these tools can actually do. If you read one source regularly, make it this one.
UFLI Foundations
An explicit, systematic phonics scope and sequence from the University of Florida Literacy Institute, with free supporting materials. Structured literacy done properly.
Word Connections
A free morphology program for grades 3–5 from Dr. Jessica Toste at UT Austin: 40 research‑based lessons on morphemes and multisyllabic decoding.
Reading Rockets
The most reliable free library of reading research translated for classroom use. Where I send teachers and families who want to understand the “why.”
The Knowledge Gap & Sold a Story
Natalie Wexler’s book and Emily Hanford’s podcast. Between them, the clearest account of why so much reading instruction went wrong. Book‑club staples in my courses.
Acadience & DIBELS
Widely used universal screeners for early reading. Useful when the whole system is aligned: screening, diagnostics, and progress monitoring pointed at the same skills.
Learning for Justice: Digital Literacy
A free digital literacy framework with lessons and PD materials. I use these to prepare preservice teachers to teach critical evaluation of sources, a skill AI has made urgent.
Faculty Guide to Getting Started with Gen AI
A joint UT Austin and Grammarly guide covering teaching uses, professional uses, and student use. A solid handout for a faculty group’s first meeting.
AI Stoplights
My own framework for assignment‑level AI policy: red, yellow, or green on each task so students never guess. Free to adapt.
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