Notes from building this.
Written by Laxman Shah while building TeachRoster— about AI in real classrooms, where marking should and shouldn’t be automated, and the small workflow decisions that give a teacher their evening back.
AI FOR TEACHERS
How to turn a PDF or your notes into a quiz in 2 minutes
For teachers: upload a PDF, your notes or a photo of last year's worksheet and get a draft quiz without retyping — plus the four checks before you assign it to a class.
AI grading: what to automate, and what you should never delegate
A working line between the marking a machine does better than you and the marking that stops being teaching the moment you hand it over.
CLASSROOM WORKFLOW
Roll call in under a minute: attendance that doesn't eat class time
Most registers are built backwards. Invert one default and a class of 35 takes seconds, with the history you need when a parent asks.
The best teacher apps of 2026, and how to tell them apart
Four tools compared on what actually decides it: whether students need accounts, what the free tier really includes, and which job each one is for. Written by the people who make one of them.
12 retrieval practice activities that take ten minutes or less
Twelve retrieval practice examples for teachers — the brain dump (the blurting method), two-minute starters, flashcards done properly — with the time each takes, what it tells you, and the research on why recalling beats rereading.
15 exit ticket questions that tell you what to reteach tomorrow
Fifteen exit ticket examples for teachers, sorted by what they tell you — plus math exit tickets by grade, a free printable template, and the three-pile sort that turns thirty answers into the first ten minutes of the next lesson.
Next up: setting AI help rules students can’t game, what to do the day after half the class fails a quiz, and homework that survives a Chromebook cart and patchy Wi-Fi.