Five AI Tools I Actually Use Every Week as an Educator

Every week someone sends me an article about an AI tool that is going to 'revolutionise education'. I have read approximately four hundred of these articles. Ninety percent of them describe tools I have never opened more than once.

This is not that article. These are the five tools that have survived my personal test of actual usefulness, the ones I keep opening on a Monday morning when I am trying to prepare something good before the week starts.

1. Claude, for thinking alongside

I use Claude when I am stuck, not when I want something written for me, but when I need to think out loud with something that can push back. I will paste in a lesson plan and ask what I am missing. I will describe a student's behaviour and ask what else it might mean. I will write a paragraph and ask if there is a cleaner way to say it. Claude is less a writing assistant and more a thinking partner.

2. Diffit, for differentiated resources

Diffit does one thing and does it well: it takes any text, an article, a passage, a topic, and creates levelled reading materials from it. I use it to build three versions of the same resource without spending three times as long. For an inclusive classroom, this is not a nice-to-have. It is a genuine time-saver that used to eat most of a Sunday.

3. Canva Magic, for visual materials that don't look amateur

I am not a designer. I never will be. But the students in front of me deserve materials that look considered, not knocked together at 10pm the night before. Canva's AI tools, particularly Magic Design and Magic Write, help me build something that looks intentional in a fraction of the time.

4. NotebookLM, for working with documents

When I am reading research, policy documents, or curriculum guides, NotebookLM lets me have a conversation with the text. I can ask it to summarise, to find tensions, to compare sections. For staying across the literature without drowning in it, nothing else comes close.

5. Otter.ai, for capturing conversations

I think better when I am talking. Otter lets me record and transcribe my own thinking, on a walk, after a class, during a planning session, and then search through it later. Half my best ideas would have been lost without it.

None of these tools will make you a better teacher on their own. But used deliberately, they give back the one resource every educator is permanently short of: time. And with that time, if you spend it well, you can be more present with the students who actually need you.