The AI tools I actually use in my work (and the ones I quietly ditched)

Over the past year I have used a lot of AI tools. Some I found through recommendations, some through my own searching, and some were sent to me by people who wanted me to review them. I have no affiliate relationships and no one is paying me to say nice things about anything here. This is just what I kept and what I dropped.

The Ones I Kept

ChatGPT sits at the top of the list, not because it is the most education-specific, but because it is the most flexible. The prompting skills you build with ChatGPT transfer to every other AI tool. If you only learn one tool, learn this one. The free version is genuinely capable. The paid version is worth the cost if you use it regularly for documentation work.

MagicSchool AI is the best education-specific tool I have tested. The IEP drafting and behaviour documentation tools are legitimately useful. It is built around the actual workflow of an educator rather than being a general AI tool with a school-themed interface. There is a free tier.

Diffit is a genuine timesaver for anyone working in inclusive settings. The ability to take any piece of text and generate it at multiple reading levels, complete with comprehension questions and vocabulary support, solves a real problem that used to take hours. I use it most weeks.

Canva AI, specifically the text-to-design and background removal features, has replaced a lot of the low-level visual resource creation I used to do manually. It is not life-changing but it is consistently useful for producing classroom visuals that look clean and professional without requiring design skills.

The Ones I Dropped

I will not name specific tools in this section because I do not want to unfairly damage products that may improve over time, but here are the patterns that made me stop using things.

The Tools Nobody Talks About

Read&Write by Texthelp does not get enough attention in the AI conversation because it has been around longer than the current AI boom and is not trying to be a generative AI product. It is a literacy support tool that helps students access text: text-to-speech, word prediction, reading supports. For students with reading difficulties, this kind of tool often matters more than any lesson planning AI.

Microsoft Copilot in schools is worth knowing about if your school uses Microsoft 365. It is embedded in the tools you already use, which means the adoption barrier is lower than a standalone app. The quality varies but for drafting emails and summarising long documents it is reliable.

What I Have Learned About AI Tools in General

The tools that have stuck in my workflow share a common quality: they are good at one specific thing rather than trying to be everything. MagicSchool is good at education-specific documentation. Diffit is good at levelled texts. ChatGPT is good at flexible drafting. The tools I dropped were mostly trying to be a complete AI teaching assistant when what I actually needed was a sharp tool for a specific job.

I also have more trust in AI tools that show you what they produced and expect you to check it, rather than tools that present their output as finished and authoritative. Education involves high-stakes decisions about real people. Any tool that does not build in that expectation of human review is a tool that is not being honest about its limitations.

Where to Start