The start of a school year comes with plenty of excitement and often long to-do lists. As a teacher, I was always looking for ways to stay organized and use my time wisely. Each year as I returned to my classroom, I tackled some of the same challenges. From finalizing lesson plans and setting up my space to make routines more likely to stick, to learning about new initiatives and mandates, there was so much to do during the first weeks and months of the school year.
If you’re looking for support with tasks big and small, you may want to explore how the AI tools in Kira an help you save time as you work to meet the needs of all of your students.
Today on the blog, we’ll take a look at Kira, an AI co-teacher that can support your work in numerous ways!
Your Very Own AI Co-Teacher
An AI co-teacher can support the important work you already do by handling repetitive tasks and helping you personalize instruction. Instead of a robot zooming around your classroom, an online platform full of useful tools can transform how you plan, create content, and address student needs throughout the school year.
You might think of it as a partner in your workflow, a tool that gives you back time for creativity, student connections, and instructional impact.
Kira is an AI toolkit for education that does something I often talk about in my workshops and webinars on making the most of artificial intelligence. It can help you scale your impact. How does it do this? By saving oodles of time throughout the school week that you can reallocate to connecting and engaging with students.
Sign up for Kira here and try it for free today >>
What can teachers do with an AI-powered tool like Kira?
With Kira, you can deliver a more personalized learning experience for your students and save time in the process. It’s designed to work with existing tools in your tool belt like your LMS. Alternatively, you can use it as a complete solution on its own. From lesson planning to family communication, it can help simplify instructional design, assessment, and your goals for differentiated instruction.
On their website, you can learn more about the many tools it offers teachers. Kira is COPPA, FERPA, and SOC2 type 1 compliant, and integrates with Google Classroom, Clever, Schoology, Powerschool, and more. And you can try Kira for free >>
7 Ways to Use AI in Your Classroom This Year
Using an AI co-teacher at the start of the year helps establish systems and routines. As the year continues, you can use it to provide ongoing support for lesson preparation, feedback, and differentiation. Here are seven ways you might use an AI toolkit like Kira in your classroom.
Generate a complete lesson in under a minute
Kira’s Lesson Creator can generate an entire lesson quickly, producing a full lesson of engaging activities ready for students to start working on in less than a minute. This helps reduce the time spent piecing together objectives, activities, and assessments. Kira wants educators to leave their mark on everything they make, even when it’s AI assisted. Customize your generated lesson content and do what you do best, deciding how best to teach your lesson for your students! Kira provides that starting point so planning becomes more efficient.
Give every student help during class time
In a busy classroom, it’s impossible to pause for every question or give each student the exact support they need in the moment. That’s where Kira’s AI Tutor comes in. It works alongside instruction, giving students just-in-time, individualized help at every step of a lesson. Teachers stay in control and they can adjust the level of support, tailor it to a student’s reading level, and decide when and how it’s used.
As a fifth grade teacher, there were years when I had about 20 students in my class. And there were other years where that number was closer to 30. You’ve probably been in a situation with lots of hands in the air looking for your attention. So you know it’s hard to support dozens of students at the very same time. This option gives students access to extra help while instruction continues. Or you might use it while you are working with a small group of students.
Generate engaging warm-ups
Daily warm-ups help set the tone for learning and hook students for a lesson. And know you no longer have to rack your brain thinking of something new to try. With the Lesson Warm-Ups Generator, you can create activities that review key concepts or spark interest at the start of class. This tool is housed in the Kira AI Tools library. It lets you generate warm-ups that fit naturally into the day’s lesson.
Adapt lessons for every learner
Differentiation often requires additional time and planning. When I think of the reasons I’m so excited about the power of using AI to support instructional planning, it goes beyond the “to do list” to the “wish list” items. I usually describe this to the groups of educators I work with as the things we wish we could do. These are the things we know would help students, but we just don’t have the time or capacity to take on.
The Text Leveler and Make It Relevant tools are designed to help adapt lessons for different learners. You can adjust text to various reading levels or make content more meaningful by connecting it to student interests. This allows for more personalization without creating multiple versions of the same lesson. You won’t have to start from scratch each time you want to create a high-interest resource.
Together with the AI Tutor, which provides step-by-step, just-in-time support, these tools ensure that every student gets an experience that feels personalized to their level, pace, and curiosity.
Streamline grading with consistent rubrics and feedback
Giving clear and consistent feedback is so important. However, it can take up more time than you have set aside in your schedule. With the AI Rubric Generator and QuickGrader, you can build rubrics in minutes. Then you can apply them across assignments to streamline grading while keeping feedback meaningful.. Is giving more timely feedback to students a goal this year? You may want to consider using these tools to help establish consistency.
Bonus: QuickGrader also includes built-in AI content detection and plagiarism checking.
Check for AI use without playing detective
Concerns about plagiarism and AI-generated work have become more common as students explore chatbots both independently and inside of academic settings. I’ve heard concerns from teachers and school leaders across the country about what they are seeing, or anticipate seeing, as these tools become more widely adopted.
Kira’s AI Detector and Plagiarism Detector tools allow you to check submissions more efficiently. Instead of spending time trying to uncover issues on your own, you can use these tools to quickly identify potential concerns. Then, you can use those findings to have conversations with students on ethical AI use.
Build tailored study and review materials
Creating resources to help students study new content can take a lot of time to prepare. The Study Guide Creator and Vocabulary List Generator are two tools in Kira designed to create materials that align with what you’re teaching. This makes it easier to provide students with resources for review, test preparation, or extra practice without starting from scratch.
Why start the school year with an AI co-teacher?
Beginning the year with the right tools in place helps create smoother routines. An AI co-teacher can support lesson prep, differentiation and so much more during the first weeks of the school year. Because it’s designed to integrate with tools you already use, Kira fits into existing systems rather than replacing them.
Kira is an excellent option for teachers looking to explore how an AI co-teacher can fit into their workflow. As you prepare for the new school year, AI can help streamline your workload and give you more time to focus on your students. Choose one (or all) of the tools on the list above to explore. Get started with Kira for free today!
