Editor’s Note
This article explores how one Calgary school is piloting AI tools to assist teachers with lesson planning and report card comments, aiming to reduce administrative burdens. The initiative highlights the growing role of generative AI in education as a support for educators, not a replacement.
One Calgary school is using artificial intelligence to help teachers with some of their most time-consuming tasks: creating lesson plans and writing report card comments. Connect Charter School, a grade 4 to 9 school in southwest Calgary, worked with a University of Calgary researcher to develop two generative AI tools aimed at reducing the cognitive load for teachers while completing those two tasks.
The tools — called Ally and Harmony — were introduced last year. For lesson planning, teachers input desired outcomes, unit length, and other elements. The AI generates a suggested lesson plan within minutes, which the teacher then tweaks. For report cards, teachers enter student grades and assessments. The AI tool generates comments for each student, which the teacher then reviews, edits, and personalizes.
While the school focuses on AI for teachers, high school students are already using AI extensively. Interviews with students at two Calgary high schools revealed that all eight students spoken to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Uses range from finding shows to watch and calculating recipe ratios to completing schoolwork and passing it off as their own.
Soroush Sabbaghan, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in generative AI in education, helped develop the tools for Connect Charter School. He initially declined a request to help get students using AI directly, believing it is too early for classroom instruction as the best approaches are still being understood. He supported creating tools for teachers as a way to help them understand AI’s potential and drawbacks.
