🗑 How to plan better lessons with AI

🎙 I’m a Featured Voice at ISTE / ASCD 2025!

I’ve been attending the ISTE Conference since 2016. From the presentations to the vendor hall to the community, there’s really nothing like it.

This year, for the first time, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) is combining locations with ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Design). It’ll happen June 29 to July 2 in San Antonio, Texas.

I’ve been chosen as a Featured Voice for this new co-located conference!

I’ve respected both of these organizations so much my entire career. To represent them as a Featured Voice is something I’ve always hoped to do.

I’ll present four sessions throughout the conference and do lots of demos and mini-presentations throughout the vendor hall.

Registration admits you to both ISTE and ASCD presentations — as well as the combined vendor hall and more.

📆 SUBSCRIBER APPRECIATION WEEK 📆

🎁 Subscriber Appreciation Week rolls on!

This week is all about you! Each year in April, we spend a week thanking YOU for all that you do in education — and doting on you with a digital gift basket.

We released this year’s gift basket on Monday. If you haven’t opened yours yet …

On Monday, we told you about the raffle for DTT books and merch — and a $100 Amazon gift card!

• How to enter: Click the red button above. Click the box to open it. Then click the Amazon gift card and/or the raffle ticket … and fill out the form to enter to win! (We’ll choose a winner on Sunday and announce on Monday.)

… aaaaaaaand we told you about the three awesome virtual escape rooms that our resident escape room guru Karly Moura made for you and is giving you for free!

• How to claim them: Red button above. Click box to open it. Click on the escape room(s) you want. Use code DITCHBOOK25 at checkout. It’ll be delivered to your inbox for free!

• Note: Sometimes when there’s lots of traffic to the escape rooms site, it struggles to keep up. If you have trouble, wait a little bit and try it again. Email [email protected] with questions.

There’s even more in your gift basket!

• 💥 Free downloadable AI safety coloring books / comic books from Swivl — They cover topics like verifying information sources, protecting sensitive data, and recognizing AI biases. Get them in your gift basket!

• 🕵🏽‍♀️ The Secret Agent’s Guide to Cryptography — A 26-page ebook that introduces students to the exciting world of cryptography. Get it here right now!

• 🕵🏻 Secret Agent Codebreaker: Tricky Riddles — Use these 20 secret message activities for something fun, engaging, and ready to go as we head to the end of the school year. Get it free here with code DITCHBOOK25 at checkout!

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🤖 10 factors to consider when lesson planning with AI

Lesson planning is complicated. There are so many factors to consider.

When you put lessons together into units — and units into curriculum — it gets even more complicated.

Academic standards. Curriculum goals. State mandates.

And that doesn’t even take into consideration how your students are doing in class, what their interests are, and how the uniqueness of your local culture and uniqueness plays in.

There’s a LOT to consider. And lots of teacher AI tools aren’t built to consider it all.

In today’s new post — 10 factors to consider when lesson planning with AI — you’ll learn how to plan more comprehensive lessons, units and curriculum.

You’ll learn how to use AI to factor all of it in — instead of having to remember it all yourself.

Or … you could just use Learning Genie …

About Learning Genie

Learning Genie (learning-genie.com) uses a curriculum planning AI agent called Curriculum Genie.

Curriculum Genie's AI-powered teaching assistant makes curriculum creation, adjustment, and optimization a breeze, leading to more efficient and personalized learning experiences for your students.

It helps you fold lots of things into your lessons, units, and curriculum like …

• vocabulary

• formative assessment

• academic content standards

• daily teaching tips

• Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

• culturally and linguistically responsive practice

It can even help you factor in your precise location into the lesson plans — and let your students provide input into your plans.

10 factors to consider when lesson planning with AI

Whether you use Learning Genie or not, you can use AI to make your lesson plans more comprehensive and helpful.

Here’s a quick summary of 10 things to consider when planning lessons with AI … and all of them are incorporated into Curriculum Genie.

You can read about all of them in depth in today’s new post …

1. Preparing students for tomorrow: Implementing portrait of graduate — When planning lessons, you can always ask an AI assistant, "How can I adjust my lesson plans to reflect our school district's portrait of a graduate?" Then, copy/paste a description of your portrait of a graduate for reference.

2. Generate teaching resources aligned with curriculum goals — When creating lesson plans, teacher materials, student activities, and more, reference any curriculum goals or objectives in it. In fact, you might keep some verbiage in a separate document you can copy/paste any time you create instructional materials so they're aligned to curriculum goals.

3. Use backward curriculum design to create materials — Start with the end in mind. Tell a large language model / AI assistant what you want your students to accomplish. Then, have it suggest steps to get there. Review and revise the steps that it gives you -- or use your own steps you created on your own. Then, use them to provide context whenever you ask an AI tool for teaching materials.

4. Align to content standards and other disciplines — If you haven't already, identify the content standards you must align to (and/or want to align to). Having a spreadsheet of the different standards -- and dates/units when you make connections to those standards -- can make sure that you hit everything.

5. Personalize and differentiate learning — When using an AI assistant to help you plan lessons, you can differentiate learning by asking for variations of your lesson plans that support struggling or slower learners -- and faster-paced learners that are more advanced.

6. Include formative assessment and student feedback — Formative assessment and student feedback help our students make adjustments throughout the unit so they'll reach the finish line at the end. Describe students' progress in general and an AI assistant can help generate ideas for formative assessments. And when you use AI to provide feedback on student work (WITHOUT providing personally identifying student information), you can get actionable suggestions for what to tell students to drive them forward.

7. Connect with students using localized curriculum — Provide students with engaging learning materials that reflect their local community and culture. AI assistants can help you pull in the uniqueness of where you live -- all the way down to your own town or county or geographic location. (And if you can't think of anything, an AI assistant can help you brainstorm -- just ask!)

8. Empower students as curriculum co-creators — By the time they graduate high school, in 13 years with 180 days of class, students will have endured 2,340 days of class. Bottom line: They've seen it all. They know what they like -- and what they don't like. Give students creativity and agency and let them help design how class -- and how learning -- might look.

9. Use UDL and responsive practices — Universal Design for Learning is all about accessibility -- making sure that no student is left out or at a disadvantage. Culturally responsive and linguistically responsive practices help all students -- no matter who they are -- to feel represented. It can be as little as mentioning a student's favorite baseball team, incorporating a phrase that students love to use, or including students' family or community traditions. Incorporating them can improve your plans.

10. Add customizable templates and collaborative tools — When you don't have to design engaging learning from scratch, it can save time -- and give you fresh ideas. Educators have shared tons and tons of pre-made templates all across the internet. (For example, we've created dozens of free downloadable templates in our templates library.)

Need guidance incorporating them into the exact topic and content you teach? Here's a post that uses AI to help you incorporate pre-made template to what you teach.

Learn how Learning Genie can help you do ALL of this

If this feels like a lot (it is!), you can get Learning Genie’s curriculum planning AI agent called Curriculum Genie to help you keep it all organized.

PS: As I mentioned in the introduction, Learning Genie offers a free account with four free unit plans. You can add more unit plans to your account for free just by sharing on social media.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!