Ways artificial intelligence can make your job easier
Overview: Start with one task you already do every week: rubric descriptions, slide formatting, three versions of a reading, review questions. Copy the prompt, fill in the bracketed parts, edit what comes back.
Two rules make all of this safe. First, keep student names out of any tool your school has not approved. Initials work for everything on these pages. Second, read every AI output before a student sees it, because you are the one who knows your students and AI does not.
Nothing here replaces your judgment. Each project hands you a first draft so you can spend your time on the part that needs a teacher.
Every project above follows the same shape, and once you see it you can write your own. Say who you are and what you teach. Say what you want and what it is for. Give a real example of your own material rather than describing it. Say what the output should look like, including length and format. Then say what to avoid. The bracketed parts in each prompt are there because specifics are what separate a usable draft from a generic one.
The second draft is where the value is. Almost nothing comes back right the first time. Tell it what was wrong, Ex. "too long, and the vocabulary is above my students," and ask again. Two or three rounds is normal and still faster than starting from nothing.
Good at: first drafts you will edit, generating variations of something you already made, rewriting a text at a different reading level, building a rubric or comment bank you then adjust, and reformatting material you already have. In every one of those, you are the editor and it is doing the typing.
Not good at: knowing your students, deciding a grade, checking its own facts, or anything where being confidently wrong is expensive. It does not tell you when it is guessing. Assume every number, date, citation, and quotation is wrong until you have checked it.
Do not paste student names, IEP or 504 details, or identifiable student writing into a tool your district has not vetted and contracted with. Strip the names first, or use the district's approved tool. This is a student records question rather than a matter of taste. If you are teaching students under 13, note that most consumer AI tools set 13 as their floor, which is why elementary use is nearly always the teacher running the tool rather than students having accounts.
If you want a classroom policy on student AI use, we wrote one with three sample policies by grade band: Building an AI Policy for Your Classroom.
Pick something you do every week that you do not enjoy, and that nobody would notice you had help with. Parent emails, rubrics, three versions of a reading, review questions. Do that one thing three weeks in a row before you add anything else. Teachers who try to change everything in September are the ones who have quit by October.