Practical AI for Teachers
Get the hours back. Keep the teaching.

This course is for classroom teachers who have heard a lot about AI and have not yet found the version of it that fits a real Tuesday. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, any subject. You do not need to be technical. If you can write an email, you can do everything in here.

What it is

Six lessons, each built around one job you already do: planning, making materials, giving feedback, handling students who have the same tools you do. Every lesson has real prompt text you can copy, a worked example that follows one invented teacher through the whole move, a ten-to-twenty-minute exercise on your own material, a list of the specific ways it goes wrong and how to fix each one, and links to free resources worth your time.

What it is not

It is not a tour of products. Tools change names every few months; the habits in this course do not. It is not a case for replacing anything you do well. The whole point is to hand the machine the parts of the job that were never the teaching, so you have more of yourself left for the parts that are.

What you need

• An account with one AI assistant. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot — whichever your district allows or you already have. One is enough; the habits transfer between them. Lesson 2 helps you choose if you have not.
• One note file you can reach from anywhere. Phone notes, a doc, a text file. Your context block, your prompts, your feedback style, and your classroom policy all live here by the end. This file is the actual product of the course.
• Real material from your own classroom. A handout you are using this week, one upcoming unit, one piece of student work with the name removed, and the directions for an assignment that matters. Every exercise runs on your material, not on samples.
• About three and a half hours, plus about an hour a week afterwards. The lessons are 30 to 40 minutes each and every one ends with an exercise you do rather than read.
• A rule about names. No student names, grades, IEP or 504 details, or family information goes into any tool. Strip them first, every time.

How to work through it

In order, one lesson a day if you can. The sequence is load-bearing: lesson 2 sets up a reusable context block that every later lesson assumes you have, lesson 3 produces the understanding statement that lesson 4 generates materials against, and lesson 6 puts all of it on a calendar. Skipping ahead to the prompts works about as well as skipping to the last page of a recipe.

Keep three things open while you read: the lesson, your AI tool, and your note file. Paste every prompt you run into the note file as you go, with a short name at the top of each — "rewrite, lower reading level," "my feedback style" — so you can find it in a month. Edit the prompts as you learn what your own room needs; a prompt you have changed twice is worth more than one you copied cleanly.

Do the Do this now exercise at the end of each lesson before moving on, on your own material, with a timer where the lesson asks for one. Ten to twenty minutes each. The exercises are the course; the reading is the setup. Read If it goes wrong even when nothing went wrong — most of the failures listed there are ones you will hit in week two rather than week one, and recognizing them costs nothing now.

The toolkit that comes with the course collects every prompt from all six lessons in one place, organized by job. Use it as a reference after you finish, not as a shortcut through. A prompt without the lesson behind it is a thing you paste; a prompt with the lesson behind it is a thing you can fix when it fails.