In my first year of teaching, my seasoned colleagues often told me, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” In other words, take student activities, lesson plans and assessments already created by other teachers and adapt them to save time. Fast forward to 2024, and artificial intelligence lets us take that wheel and spin it in an entirely new direction. Instead of spending hours searching for teaching resources, writing parent communications or creating presentations from scratch, AI can help us perform these tasks in a few clicks.

A 2022 EdWeek Research Center study found teachers spend less than half their time actively teaching; the majority is spent on planning, communication and grading. By reducing our workload outside the classroom, AI can alleviate burnout and allow us to focus on what we love most: teaching our students.

You can get started by using AI programs designed for education or general tools like ChatGPT. AI also has been integrated into apps you may already use, such as Canva and Google Classroom.

Be mindful that AI is still new and human edits are likely required before results meet your standards. Think of AI results as your first draft, and don’t use anything generated by AI in your classroom without careful review.

Here are some tasks AI can help you tackle. I cite a tool for each task, though most of these tools serve multiple functions. All are free or offer an educator plan at no cost.

Lesson plans: Auto Classmate has a lesson plan generator for multiple grade levels, subjects and topics. Enter a few descriptors into its template and a customizable and editable plan aligned to New York State standards emerges in seconds.

Emails: Magic School’s E-mail Responder writes a professional reply to an email or its E-mail Family generator can create parent emails on topics of your choice with translations available in multiple languages.

Classroom activities with differentiation: Enter text, a topic or an article into Diffit, and this AI tool produces student activities and key vocabulary and discussion questions on any grade or reading level, aligned to state standards and integrated with Google Classroom.

Translation: ChatGPT provides accurate translations in over 50 languages to help English language learners access important chunks of text.

Student feedback: Brisk Teaching uses AI to compose feedback for student work in Google Docs. You can personalize comments or reject suggestions that are off base. It can also summarize all your student feedback on a class assignment to identify common areas of struggle.

Self-grading assessments: Quizizz’s AI feature crafts questions from a text or topic and compiles reports on student responses to help you target areas in need of review.

Presentations: Canva’s Magic Studio produces a presentation from a text prompt in seconds. Type at least five words about the presentation, and options appear that you can edit and use.

There’s some trial and error involved in learning how to use AI effectively, but there are guides that accelerate the learning curve. OpenAI has a “Teaching with AI” guide. You can refine your results using Khan Academy’s free AI prompt guide for middle and high school teachers. Google Education has a document with prompt templates you can customize and put into an AI tool. Be patient and keep experimenting to become more proficient.