What to Automate in Teaching

Some of teaching machines well. Some of it does not. This site is about telling them apart.

Tools arrived in classrooms before instructions did. Around a third of teachers report clear guidance from their school; more than eight in ten students say nobody has shown them how to use any of it. In the gap, everyone is improvising, and most of the writing available is produced by companies selling something.

For a workplace comparison on how time and activity are measured, this workplace-oriented resource provides a separate context from classroom practice.

We sell nothing. Nobody in this market pays for anything here.

Start here

If you have twenty minutes, read what actually saves time. The measured figure is about half an hour a week, not an afternoon, and knowing that in advance prevents most disappointment.

For an external perspective on AI and education, see UNESCO’s AI in education work.

If a student is in trouble, read what you owe them before you accuse and what detector scores actually mean. These are the highest-stakes pages on the site and the reason it exists.

For an external perspective on AI and education, see Education Week’s AI coverage.

If you need rules by Monday, write a one-page class policy. Twenty minutes with the class is worth more than any document from head office.

The five sections

Planning and prep — where the hours genuinely come back, and where they only appear to.

Feedback and marking — three different jobs arriving as one pile, with different answers.

Integrity and detection — accuracy claims, false positives, and assessment that makes the question moot.

Evidence — what the research supports, what it does not, and how to read a vendor's number.

Teaching students — explaining the tools, the skill of checking, and the habit of saying what you used.

What we try to do

Separate what is demonstrated from what is promised. Say who produced a figure and when. Flag when a source is selling something. Date every claim about rules and tools, because both change monthly.

And take seriously that a site called a teaching machine should spend half its time explaining what not to give a machine.