30 AI tools for the classroom
December 22, 2023The field of artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, no longer confined to the realm of science fiction. Numerous AI tools now function as personal assistants, capable of answering questions, aiding in text composition, generating images, enhancing speech, and more.
In the educational context, time constraints have always been a challenge for teachers, hindering their ability to focus on crucial tasks. Fortunately, there are readily available AI tools that can assist teachers in various aspects of their work. Many of these tools are either free or offer “freemium” plans with limited free features.
Artificial intelligence, in essence, involves computers or machines performing tasks traditionally requiring human intelligence. This encompasses learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and more. AI systems can be built using diverse approaches, including machine learning, where systems improve performance through training on datasets, and rule-based systems, which follow predetermined rules for decision-making.
AI applications extend across a spectrum of fields, encompassing natural language processing, image and video recognition, robotics, and beyond. The ultimate goal of AI research is to develop systems that perform tasks as well as or better than humans. While AI holds transformative potential for various industries, it also poses significant ethical and social considerations.
To assist educators in incorporating AI into their classrooms, we’ve compiled a list of 30 favorite AI tools. These tools cover a range of categories, including natural language processing, image recognition, and more. It’s worth noting that pricing details are accurate as of our most recent update in November 2023.
Table of Contents
Chatbots
Bing Chat
Bing Chat is an ChatGPT-4 powered chatbot that can help you browse the web, answer questions, and much more. It can be accessed through the Bing website or Microsoft Edge browser, and can be used to ask both simple and complex questions, request summaries of articles, books, events, news, sports results, and more. Bing Chat can also be used as a creative tool, helping you write poems, stories, or even share ideas for a project
How it works: Just go to bing.com and click chat. (You’ll need to be logged in to a Microsoft account.) When you do, you can
- Provide Bing with questions or prompts and get detailed responses powered by generative AI
- Choose whether you want a balanced response — or something more creative or precise
- Upload images to your search that you want the AI assistant to analyze
- Ask questions with your voice by clicking the microphone button
- Get AI-generated responses on the go with the Bing mobile app
Pricing and terms: Free.
Check it out: Go to bing.com and click chat. Learn more with this Bing Chat for Educators Course.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot that interacts with you conversationally, the way a human would. It’s trained with information from all over the internet and tons of other sources — and it’s been trained by humans to interact with you in an authentic way.
How it works: Ask ChatGPT a question or give it a request. It will respond. There are lots of ways you can use it in the classroom, as detailed in this post: ChatGPT, Chatbots, and Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom.
Pricing and terms: It’s a “freemium” tool, meaning there’s a free plan and a paid premium plan.
You can give it unlimited queries with the free version.
ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) gives general access to ChatGPT, even during peak times. It provides faster response times. Plus, it gives priority access to new features and improvements.
Check it out: chat.openai.com
Perplexity
Perplexity is another generative AI chatbot that lets users ask questions and get responses conversationally. What seems to set Perplexity apart is that it cites sources, which are easily clickable to get more context and more information.
How it works: Go to Perplexity and ask it a question or request something. You’ll see the concise version at first, but you can click to see a detailed response. It will also list the sources where it drew its information and other related topics. You can ask follow up questions, in a conversational manner like ChatGPT.
Pricing and terms: Perplexity is free.
Check it out: perplexity.ai
Google Bard
Google Bard is an experimental conversational AI chat service developed by Google. Google Bard is designed to engage in text-based conversations with users, offering responses and generating human-like dialogue. It uses advanced natural language processing techniques to understand and generate text in response to user prompts, making it a useful tool for natural language understanding and generation.
How it works: Go to bard.google.com (if you are in a education account your admin will need to first enable access) and enter your question, prompt or have a conversation with Bard
Pricing and terms: Google Bard is free.
Check it out: bard.google.com
Pi
Pi is your personal AI companion, ready to assist you with various tasks and provide answers to your queries. It’s designed to be supportive, smart, and available whenever you need it.
How it works: To use Pi, you can interact with it through text or voice commands. You can ask questions, seek advice, or simply engage in conversation with the AI. It’s intended to be a helpful companion for various tasks and interactions.
Pricing and terms: Pi is free.
Check it out: Visit Pi at pi.ai or download from the App Store
Visual & Design Tools
Adobe Express with Firefly
Adobe Express incorporates Adobe’s Firefly generative AI model, which gives users new ways to bring their ideas to life. With generative AI, you can create custom images and text effects using text prompts. As an educator you can use this feature to generate unique and engaging visuals for your lessons and activities.
How it works: You can access Adobe’s generative AI tools, powered by Firefly, directly from the Adobe Express all-in-one editor.
Pricing and terms: Free and easy to use.
Check it out: firefly.adobe.com
Bing Image Creator
Image Creator generates AI images based on your text. It uses DALL-E technology to generate images that you can share, save, or download.
How it works: Type in a description of an image you’d like to see. Take the resulting images and download or save them — or ask for an adjustment to them.
Pricing and terms: Free. You get a limited number of boosts (which make image generation faster). If you run out of boosts, it’ll take longer to generate images.
Check it out: https://www.bing.com/create
Pictory
Pictory AI is a really cool platform that makes it super easy to create engaging videos. It uses advanced AI technology to help you turn your written scripts or articles into captivating videos. You can even add your own voice or use an AI voiceover to bring your video to life.
How it works: After signing up for an account you can copy and paste your video script, or type it directly into the editor. Then choose your template and aspect ratio, and Pictory AI will do the rest.
Your final video and script will be storyboarded by Pictory’s AI software, visuals are automatically generated, and captions applied. You can edit it as you want or use it as is.
Pricing and terms: Pictory offers a free trial plan that lets you create up to three video projects, each up to 10 minutes long. If you want more features, they have paid plans starting at $19 per month.
Check it out: pictory.ai
Canva Classroom Magic
Canva Classroom Magic is a suite of AI tools designed for educators. It includes features such as Magic Design, a free AI design tool for creating visual content, and Magic Write, an AI text generator and writer that assists in generating written content.
How it works: Canva Magic Design tools are built into Canva. Once you’re logged in, you can explore the Magic Classroom tools, including Magic Design, a free AI design tool, and Magic Write, an AI text generator and writer, by navigating the relevant sections inside of Canva.
Pricing and terms: Get your free Canva EDU Pro account by getting verified at canva.com/education.
Check it out: Introducing Canva’s biggest education launch
Lesson Design & Content Creation Tools
Curipod
Give Curipod (curipod.com/ai) a topic, and it will generate an interactive slide deck for you in seconds, including:
- Polls
- Word clouds
- Open-ended questions
- A drawing tool
How it works: Once you have a slide deck (which seems to generate 9-12 slides on your topic), you can edit and adjust to suit your needs. Plus, you can add more slides on your own.
Pricing and terms: It’s has a paid and a premium plan, but honestly … the free plan has almost everything you’d want. You can check out the premium features on the pricing page.
Check it out: curipod.com/ai
Diffit
Diffit allows you to get leveled resources for literally anything. You can adapt existing materials for any reader, generate “just right” resources for any topic and then edit and share resources with students.
How it works: Go to web.diffit.me and enter a search for a topic, term, or question; enter a url; or paste copied text. From there, choose a reading level and language, and click “generate resources.”. Diffit will automatically generate tons of resources based on the content you provide. They have an ever-growing library of templates and give teachers a few options for sharing the content with students.
Pricing and terms: Teachers who create their free Diffit account before December 31, 2023, will automatically get free trial access to all the new and upcoming premium features through January 31, 2024. Teachers who create an account after January 1, 2024, will automatically get free access to premium features for the first 30 days from their account creation date.
Check it out: Go to web.diffit.me and sign up for your free account.
MagicSchool.ai
MagicSchool.ai is an AI-powered educational platform designed to help teachers save time by automating tasks such as lesson planning, grading, and generating educational content. It offers over 40 AI tools that are searchable by keyword and categorized for planning, student support, community, productivity, and community tools.
Magic School is trained on best practices for educators and is compliant with FERPA
and declines non-education-related requests.
How it works: Visit Magic School and choose a tool. From there, you will enter in whatever information you need to generate the resource. For example, if you choose the YouTube Question Generator, you’ll enter the grade level, number of questions, question type, and video url.
Pricing and terms: Magic School is free.
Check it out: Go to app.magicschool.ai for information and to sign up. Or get the new Chrome extension from the Chrome webstore.
Education Copilot
Need a starting point for your lesson plans? Education Copilot provides you with AI generated templates for lesson plans, writing prompts, educational handouts, student reports, project outlines and lots more.
It has 10+ tools to help save time and create content for the classroom.
How it works: Open Copilot and choose one of its teacher tools, including informational handouts, lesson plans, and more. Add some details to the content you want to cover. Then generate a product. If it isn’t exactly what you want, adjust the information you input to create something else.
Pricing and terms: 30-day free trial. After that, it’s $9 per month.
Check it out: Go to the Education Copilot website for information and to sign up.
Nolej
Nolej generates lots of interactive educational content, like all-in-one courses, interactive videos, assessments, and plug-and-play content.
How it works: Provide content (like text, videos, audio, YouTube, websites, etc.). AI analyzes it and generates educational content. After that, you can embed, export, or integrate with your learning management system (LMS).
Pricing and terms: Free plan: generate 5 packages for free. Paid ($19.999/mo, $199.99/yr): 4 purchase options, top ups, and in-app support.
Check it out: http://nolej.io
Eduaide.ai
Eduaide.ai is an AI-powered teaching assistant designed to help teachers with lesson planning, instructional design, and generating educational content. It offers a resource generator, teaching assistant, feedback bot and AI chat.
How it works: Much like MagicSchool.ai, Eduaide.ai provides tons of options for resources for your grade level and content area.
Pricing and terms: Eduaide.ai offers a free plan with limited access and a Pro plan ($5.99/mo) for those who want the full suite of tools and resources.
Check it out: Go to the eduaide.ai website for information and to sign up.
Khanmigo
Khanmigo is an AI-powered learning tool developed by Khan Academy that can be used as a virtual tutor and as a debate partner. It can also be used by teachers to generate lesson plans and assist with other administrative tasks.
How it works: In student mode, Khanmigo can be used as a virtual tutor and debate partner.
In teacher mode, Khanmigo can be used to generate lesson plans and assist with other administrative tasks.
Pricing and terms: From the Khan Academy website: To cover the costs we pay for GPT-4, you’ll be asked to make a monthly donation of $9 or an annual donation of $99 to access Khanmigo’s personalized learning.
Check it out: To learn more about Khanmigo, visit the Khan Academy website or go to blog.khanacademy.org/teacher-khanmigo.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is an AI-powered writing tool that uses machine learning to generate various types of content, including blog headlines, emails, social media content, web copy, and more.
Educators can use it to generate lesson plans, substitute teaching plans, newsletter copy, email, writing prompts and more.
How it works: Enter your prompt to generate your text copy.
Pricing and terms: Copy.ai offers a free plan in which one user can use 2,000 words or 10 credits a month free of charge and without adding their credit card information. The Pro plan costs $36/month and includes unlimited words or 500 credits per month.
Check it out: Try it for free at app.copy.ai
Teaching Aides
gotFeedback by gotLearning
gotFeedback helps teachers provide more individualized feedback to their students in a timely way. It’s integrated into the gotLearning platform. It’s modeled on the research that feedback needs to be goal-referenced, tangible and transparent, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing, and consistent.
How it works: Choose what you want gotFeedback to provide feedback on. Upload a Word document or PDF file — or paste in text. It provides an evaluation that you can use as a teacher — or copy/paste to give to a student.
Pricing and terms: Free version of gotLearning includes up to three teachers and an administrator. Large teams plan for gotLearning is $299 per teacher.
Check it out: https://www.gotlearning.com/gotfeedback/
Grammarly
Grammarly is your online writing assistant. Using artificial intelligence, it helps you compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing. It can work inside your email client, your productivity suites, and even your social media. Grammarly’s AI checks grammar, spelling, style, tone, and more.
How it works: Type directly into the Grammarly editor, paste writing from another document or use the Grammarly add-on available for many sites and apps.
Pricing and terms: It’s a “freemium” tool, meaning there’s a free plan and a paid premium plan.
The free plan checks for grammar, spelling, punctuation, conciseness and tone detection.
The premium plan costs $12.00 USD/month and includes everything in the free plan plus full-sentence rewrites, word choice, tone suggestions and citations
Check it out: Grammarly.com
Goblin Tools
Goblin Tools is a collection of small, simple, single-task tools designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. The tools include Magic ToDo, Formalizer, Judge, Estimator, and Compiler.
How it works: To use Goblin Tools, visit the website or download the app and select the tool you need. For example, to use Magic ToDo, users can enter a task and adjust the “spiciness level” to break it down into parts. Once the task is broken down, users can further simplify any subtasks if necessary and check off completed task.
Pricing and terms: The web version of Goblin Tools is free. The apps are reasonably priced (the website states that purchasing the app helps keep the website free).
Check it out: https://goblin.tools/
Hello History
Hello History is an app that lets you have life-like conversations with historical figures. Get a personal perspective on life, history, and the world from some of the most influential figures of all time – Cleopatra, Einstein, Buddha, and more.
How it works: Use the app (iOS and Android). Choose a historical character. Ask it questions and discuss.
Pricing and terms: Limited free version with in-app upgrades.
Check it out: https://www.hellohistory.ai/
Chat PDF
ChatPDF is an AI-powered tool that allows users to interact with PDF documents in a conversational format. From the website “ChatPDF in a Nutshell
Your PDF AI – like ChatGPT but for PDFs. Summarize and answer questions for free.”
How it works: Upload your PDF by clicking on the “Drop PDF here” section and selecting the PDF you want to upload to the chatbot. You can also drag the file into the “Drop PDF here” section. Once you’ve uploaded the file, you will be sent to the actual chatbot. ChatPDF will automatically generate a brief summary of the key points in the PDF. You can then interact with your document by typing a question in a conversational language in the chat box, just as if speaking to an actual person.
Pricing and terms: ChatPDF allows you to use it for free with 2 PDFs every day, each up to 120 pages.
Check it out: https://www.chatpdf.com/
Quiz/Assessment Generators
QuestionWell
QuestionWell generates an endless supply of questions, so teachers can focus on what matters. Just input some reading, and the AI will write essential questions, learning objectives, and aligned multiple-choice questions.
How it works: Copy or paste a reading. Add a topic and any learning objectives or standards. The AI creates learning objectives and questions you can export.
Pricing and terms: Free
Check it out: http://questionwell.org
Formative AI
Formative has been an assignment and quiz platform for a long time, allowing teachers to ask students a variety of question types. Now it has incorporated the power of ChatGPT to generate new standard-aligned questions and hints for learners as well as student feedback.
How it works: Activate beta features in your Formative account. Then use the Auto-Generate button inside your Formative assignment.
Pricing and terms: AI features available in all account types. Bronze (free): unlimited lessons, assignments, and assessments with real-time student tracking, classes, and basic integrations. Silver ($15/mo): everything in Bronze plus advanced question types, grading/feedback tools, and advanced assignment settings. Gold (get a quote): lots of additional features beyond Silver.
Check it out: formative.com
Quizizz AI
Quizizz AI is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that can generate multiple-choice questions with four answer options, of which one is the correct answer. Quizizz AI can automatically determine the appropriate number of questions to generate from the content provided.
Quizizz AI can also modify existing quizzes, both manually created and AI-generated, with Enhance to customize activities according to students’ needs.
How it works: From the Quizizz help center- There are three ways in which you can allow Quizizz AI to automatically generate a quiz for you.
- Generate a quiz from a document: Upload a PDF/ PPT/ DOC file and Quizizz AI will extract its contents to generate a set of questions
- Generate a quiz from a webpage: Paste the link to a webpage and Quizizz AI will automatically process its contents to create a quiz
- Generate a quiz from text: Copy and paste any text material, type in your quiz topic, or provide a prompt with a few keywords and watch as Quizizz AI churns out a unique quiz for you
Pricing and terms: Quizizz offers free and paid premium versions. Schools and districts can also pay for premium access. Check out the individual paid “super” plan on its pricing page.
Check it out: quizizz.com/home/quizizz-ai
Conker
Conker lets you create multiple-choice, read-and-respond, and fill-in-the-blank quizzes for students at a variety of levels on specific topics. It will also let you copy/paste reading material to generate quizzes.
How it works: Open Conker and provide some details about the quiz you want to create. Conker creates a short quiz you can assign to students with a code — or export to Google Forms. You can even create a printable question sheet and answer sheet.
Pricing and terms: Free
Check it out: http://conker.ai
Twee
Twee is an AI-powered tool designed to simplify lesson planning for English teachers by generating questions, dialogues, stories, letters, articles, multiple-choice questions, true/false statements, and more.
How it works: To use Twee, teachers can go to twee.com and create an account. Once you’re in choose a tool to generate resources from such as creating a matching exercise. Input the information needed to produce the content and click “Do the magic!”
Pricing and terms: Teachers can create a free account.
Check it out: Go to Twee.com and learn more in this video.
Collaboration & Communication Tools
FigJam Jambot
Jambot is a FigJam widget that brings the power of ChatGPT’s AI to your boards.
How it works from the Figma website:
To find and run the Jambot widget:
- Hover over the pile of recently used icons in the toolbar, then click More.
- From the Widgets tab, search Jambot.
- Click or drag to add the widget to the board.
- Add text to the input sticky.
- Select a function.
Pricing and terms: FigJam is free
Check it out: Learn more in this support article Use Jambot in FigJam
summarize.tech
Get a summary of any long YouTube video, like a lecture, live event or a government meeting. Powered by ChatGPT.
How it works: Add a URL of a YouTube video. It creates a summary with clickable timestamps that you can copy and paste to use anywhere.
Pricing and terms: Free
Check it out: http://summarize.tech
Parlay Genie
Parlay Genie (part of Parlay) is a discussion prompt generator. It generates higher-order thinking questions for your class based on a topic, a YouTube video, or an article. It uses ChatGPT to generate prompts for your students.
How it works: Create a RoundTable inside Parlay (parlayideas.com). Select Parlay Genie. Choose between a written or verbal RoundTable. Fill in information about the topic you want and click “Generate Prompt”. Edit what it creates if you’d like. Then invite students.
Pricing and terms: Basic plan (free): Unlimited courses and students, 12 RoundTables (at one time). Individual premium ($120/year): Everything in Basic plus unlimited RoundTables, co-teachers, data export, and more.
Check it out: http://parlayideas.com
