Skip to main content

Posts

You Didn’t Become a Teacher to Make Photocopies

When you stood in front of your first class and declared your passion for the craft, you were thinking about the debates, the big ideas, and those small, miraculous moments of discovery. You were not thinking about the rhythmic, soul-crushing sound of the photocopier jamming for the third time in a row. The administrative burden of teaching is a silent, but deadly, form of burnout. It’s the late nights spent crafting differentiated worksheets, the Sunday mornings building a Socratic seminar from scratch, and the endless quest to find a primary source document with a reading level that won’t send half the class into a collective coma. You got into this profession to inspire critical thinkers, to mentor young minds, and to ignite a love of learning. So what if there was a way to get back to the good stuff? A way to reclaim your time from the paper-pushing and the endless planning? This is where a new generation of specialized AI assistants—specifically designed for ELA and History teache...
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Introducing Saved Chats in Teacher:Smarter

We've all been there. You're in the zone, collaborating with your favorite AI assistant, and you've just generated the perfect set of discussion questions for tomorrow's lesson. Or maybe you've crafted a beautifully differentiated text that you know you'll want to use again. You make a mental note to copy it over later, but then the bell rings, a student has a question, and just like that, the brilliant content is lost in the shuffle of a busy school day. Well, we're excited to announce that those days are over. Introducing a brand new, highly-requested feature on Teacher:Smarter: Saved Chats! Your Personal Library of AI-Generated Content With our new Saved Chats feature, you can now save any conversation you have with our AI tools. Think of it as your own personal library of lesson plans, re-written texts, project ideas, and more. Everything you create is now just a click away, ready to be revisited, refined, or reused. How It Works Saving your work is as ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Literary Detective - Using teacher:smarter's ELA Tools for Novel Studies

  There are two kinds of students: the one who devours books and can't wait to tell you about the "deeper meaning," and the one who stares at a paragraph of prose like it's written in an ancient, unreadable script. You, the teacher, are the bridge between these two worlds, but sometimes you need a little help building that bridge. Enter the ELA tools on the teacher:smarter platform, an AI-powered suite designed to make you and your students the ultimate literary detectives. Instead of spending hours hunting for examples of figurative language or character motivations, you can now generate the clues in seconds and focus on the fun part: solving the case. Powered by Google's Gemini models, these tools transform any piece of text into a structured analysis. This isn't just about finding answers; it's about providing the scaffolding your students need to understand the "why" behind the "what." With tools like the Literary Analysis , Charac...
Post a Comment
Read more

Structured Response: The RACE and PEEL Generators

 Let's be honest, you became a teacher because you're a superhero, not a robot. But sometimes, lesson planning—especially for analytical writing—feels like a job for a machine. You spend hours reading a text, writing questions, creating a model response, and then a student asks, "Wait, what's a 'topic sentence' again?" and you have to start all over. What if there was a way to get the brainy part of the job done in seconds, leaving you with more time to be the inspiring, amazing teacher you are? Meet the RACE and PEEL generators on the teacher:smarter platform , your new AI-powered sidekicks for a late elementary, middle, or early high school classroom. They are not just tools; they’re your personal curriculum designers, ready to transform any text into a powerful, skill-building activity. The RACE Generator: Your Personal Comprehension Coach Remember when your students' text-based answers were a single, glorious word? The RACE writing strategy is des...
Post a Comment
Read more

teacher:smarter - How a Terrible AI Training Session Inspired a New Tool for Educators

teacher:smarter was born out of pure dissatisfaction. It all started with a four-hour long, "self-paced," mandatory Professional Development session on AI my district rolled out this past spring. While the second half was pure district slop, the first half was a surprisingly interesting, if very canned, “Google Gemini for Educators” course. The training hit all the usual notes on ethics and privacy. But then it got to prompt writing, and a lightbulb went on. A strong prompt isn't just typing a question into a box. It requires a thinking process. It demands precise writing and editing. It involves adaptation, experimentation, and yes, failure.  It requires a teacher. My Revelation: AI is Just a Word Calculator   From that perspective, my view of AI completely shifted. I stopped seeing it as a Studio Ghibli meme generator. I stopped seeing it as the boogeyman that lets my students cheat or threatens my job. (Frankly, I have serious doubts about AI’s ability t...
Post a Comment
Read more