AI Tools for Teachers: Lesson Prep, Materials, Study Aids

The useful question for a teacher is not which assistant is smartest but which jobs recur every week. Four do: writing plans, adapting one task for different levels, working from the material you actually teach, and building something students look at. Each has a tool that is better at it than a general assistant.

ChatGPT covers the drafting: a lesson plan from a learning objective, a rubric, or three versions of the same worksheet at different reading levels — free to evaluate, Plus at $20/mo when it becomes weekly. Gemini is the sensible choice when the school already lives in Google's tools, and our catalog lists its consumer tiers at Google AI Plus $4.99/mo and AI Pro $19.99/mo above the free tier. NotebookLM is the one worth explaining, because it does something the others do not: you upload the documents and it answers from them with references back to the source, free with higher limits under Google AI Pro. That is the difference between an assistant inventing a plausible summary of a topic and one working from the textbook chapter you assigned. Gamma turns an outline into slides, free with Plus at $12/mo and Pro at $25/mo.

The line that must not be crossed is about data, not quality. Lesson plans, worksheets and explanations are safe to generate and rewrite; a named pupil's assessment record, an IEP or anything from a safeguarding file is personal data held in trust, and a consumer tier is the wrong place for it regardless of how good the model is. That also applies to uploading a scanned class list to ask for help organising it. Two smaller limits worth knowing: NotebookLM will answer confidently from whatever you upload, so a stale or partial source produces a confident wrong answer, and Gamma's slides always need reading before a class sees them, because a generated deck is a first draft with your name on it.