Grading the machine's lesson plan: building developmental judgment by critiquing AI activities
Hand students a polished, quietly wrong AI lesson plan and make the assignment finding what is wrong and naming which principle it violates.
Child Development and Educational Studies (CDES)
Students here are training to become the people who decide whether a classroom adopts these tools. That makes the professional evaluation skill — reading a privacy policy, judging developmental appropriateness — more valuable than fluency with any particular product.
Workflows
How people actually chain these tools together to get something done.
Remediating a semester of course materials without hand-writing two hundred alt texts
AI drafts descriptions and captions at volume while the judgment — what the image is for — stays with you, because that is the part the machine genuinely cannot do.
Building a working thing you could not build alone, then making it live
Specify it, make the assistant plan it, build the smallest version that runs, then find and describe exactly what is broken. The defect log is the skill; the artifact is…
Keeping field notes next to the numbers
Your dashboard knows the fill rate. It does not know that the room was freezing and half the class had no textbook. Put both in the same table.
One reading, four proficiency levels, same discussion
Generate genuine reading-level variants of a single text so a mixed-proficiency section can discuss the same content — then check what the simplification quietly threw…
Tools for Child Development and Educational Studies
Canva Magic Studio
An AI-powered design suite for creating slides, handouts, posters, infographics, and quick visuals using ready-made templates and smart layout tools. Best for: Visual lesson materials, anchor charts, and classroom…
Diffit
Generates leveled versions of a reading passage with vocabulary and comprehension questions.
Effective AI Prompting for Educators
A professional development resource from the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges focused on practical strategies for crafting effective prompts to support teaching, assessment, and student engagement. Best…
Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)
Source-grounded research assistant that answers only from documents you upload, with citations back to the text.
Khanmigo
Khan Academy's Socratic tutor that guides students toward answers rather than supplying them.
Why here: A worked example of Socratic scaffolding to analyze against learning theory.
Machine Learning for Kids
A website to teach machine learning concepts
MagicSchool AI
Teacher-facing generators for lesson plans, rubrics, IEP support and family communication, plus student tools.
Why here: Evaluate it as a professional artifact, not just a time-saver — the privacy policy is the lesson.
Otter.ai
Real-time transcription and meeting notes with speaker labels and searchable transcripts.
Packback
AI-moderated discussion platform that scores question quality and pushes students toward open inquiry.
PlayLab AI
PlaylabAI is a 501c3 nonprofit organization devoted to creating a future where educators and students around the world have the agency to not just use AI, but to shape it. On their terms. As part of a global community…
Read&Write (Everway)
Literacy support toolbar with text-to-speech, word prediction, picture dictionary and vocabulary tools.
SchoolAI
Teacher-monitored AI spaces where students interact with a bounded chatbot under live instructor visibility.
Why here: Useful mainly as a professional case study in child-safety versus surveillance tradeoffs.
Teaching Machine Learning
A website to teach Machine Learning Concepts
Universal Access Bot (Accessibility)
An AI-powered accessibility assistant built in Playlab that helps instructors adapt course materials to be more inclusive, readable, and aligned with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. Best for: Improving…
General-purpose tools that work in any discipline (13)
Nothing here is specific to Child Development and Educational Studies. They are listed once, in every discipline, so the section above stays about the tools that actually are.
Adobe
Boost classroom and career success with Adobe solutions for education. From critical thinking and creative problem-solving to communication and collaboration, Adobe’s creative apps, PDF tools, and responsibly developed…
Anthropic-Claude for Education
An advanced writing and analysis assistant known for strong summarization, nuanced reasoning, and the ability to handle long documents and extended context. Best for: Drafting policies and professional communications…
Beautiful.ai
Presentation tool whose slides auto-adjust layout as content changes, free for a year to verified students.
BoodleBox
BoodleBox is an innovative AI-powered platform designed specifically for educators, offering a collaborative workspace where teachers can efficiently create, organize, and share lesson plans, assessments, and classroom…
Brisk Teaching
Chrome extension layering feedback, leveling and lesson tools onto Google Docs and the browser.
Gamma.app
Gamma is an AI-powered tool for creating presentations, documents, websites, and visuals fast, with polished design, easy sharing, and exports.
Google (Gemini Pro)
A multimodal AI assistant integrated with Google Workspace, capable of summarizing Docs, analyzing Sheets, and generating or outlining Slides. Can be paired with Veo 3 for high-quality video creation within the Google…
Grammarly (with Authorship)
Writing assistant with grammar and clarity feedback, plus Authorship, which logs how text entered a document.
Microsoft CoPilot
An AI assistant integrated across Microsoft 365, supporting document summarization, email drafting, and data analysis within familiar school workflows. Best for: Quick drafts, meeting summaries, and extracting insights…
Napkin AI
Turns written text into editable business diagrams, flowcharts and visual frameworks.
OpenAI for Education
A versatile AI assistant for lesson planning, rubric creation, parent communication, accommodations, and role-play scenarios. Can be paired with Sora (OpenAI’s video generation tool) to create short lesson clips and…
Perplexity Comet
AI browser with a built-in assistant that reads, summarizes and acts across open tabs.
Perplexity for Education
An AI-powered research assistant that provides cited sources and organized collections, making it especially useful for current topics and rapid topic overviews. Best for: Unit background research, current events, and…
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