Build Your Own AI Teaching Tool — Yes, Really!

Jun 22, 2026 | Blog

Quick Tip: Watch the video below to see me build this current events tool from scratch — the same approach works for any subject you teach — then grab the how-to guide and the class reference template (both linked under this post) and build your own.

Barbara Oakley best-selling author

You know the feeling. Thirty students in one room, and a reading range that runs from still building stamina to finished the novel last week and wants the sequel. You hand out one article. A few breeze through it. A few get stuck on the second sentence. And a couple quietly check out before they ever reach the part you wanted to discuss.

We’re told, constantly, to differentiate. Good advice. Also, on a Thursday when your prep period just vanished because a colleague went home sick and there was no sub to be found, a tall order. Rewrite one news article at three reading levels, write tiered questions for each, then do it all again next week.

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Who has the time?

Well, YOU do — if you build the tool once and then let it work for you all year long. (And then some!)

And here’s what surprised me once I’d built mine: the tool that levels a news article for my civics class will do the same for yours, whatever you teach. The science teacher who wants a fresh article on the latest Mars mission. The health teacher hunting for something straight about vaping. The social studies teacher pulling coverage of a Supreme Court ruling. Same vanished prep period. Same impossible ask. One tool, built once, handles all of it — because you’re the one who taught it what your room needs.

Here’s the part that still feels a little like magic to me: you build that tool yourself, by talking to an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant in plain English. No code. No computer science degree. No late-night tutorials on something called Python. Just a conversation, the same kind you’d have explaining an assignment to a student teacher.

I know how that sounds. I promise it is easier than you think. I recently walked a whole room of teachers through building this exact tool, start to finish, and you can watch the entire thing in the video below. (At one point I upload the wrong file, catch it mid-sentence, and just tell the assistant “whoops, ignore that, here’s the right one.” It says no problem and carries on. That is the whole vibe. You cannot break it.)

What You Actually Build

Picture one instruction you type into your assistant: “Find current events for my class on supply and demand this week.” A few minutes later, you have one clean document with:

✔  Four real, recent news articles from credible sources, each with a working link so you can verify it

✔  The same story rewritten at three reading levels (emerging, on-level, and advanced) so every student reads about the same event at a level that fits

✔  A short vocabulary list for each article, defined in plain language, with an example sentence

✔  Critical-thinking questions tiered to Bloom’s Taxonomy, so your emerging readers recall and explain while your advanced readers evaluate and defend

One topic in. Thirty students served. That’s the differentiation we are always asked for, finally cut down to a size a human being can actually manage.

And here is the quietly remarkable part. You didn’t buy that tool. You didn’t download it from a store or hire anyone to make it. You built it, in a conversation, by describing what you wanted. We used to hoard prompts in a document and paste them in one at a time, every single day. Now you teach the assistant your routine once, and it remembers.

The Reference Sheet Runs the Show

Here’s what makes the tool yours instead of generic. Before it does anything, it reads a short reference sheet you fill out for one class: your subject, your grade, your standards, your three reading bands described in your own words, your students’ accommodations, the sources you trust, and the ones you don’t.

That sheet is the boss. It overrides every default. So a U.S. government teacher, a health teacher, and an economics teacher can each build something shaped to that room, out of the same tool. Have a group of English-language learners who need extra context for idioms? Put it in the sheet. Have a news outlet you never want to see surface? Name it, and it stays gone. The more specific you are, the better the fit.

One rule matters more than all the others: keep it general. Describe needs, not people. No student names, no private details, ever.

(I’ll confess that when I built a sample sheet for a fictional civics and economics class, the recurring themes I typed in — incentives, trade-offs, the rule of law, and the unintended consequences of policy — looked suspiciously like the principles we build whole lessons around here at SITC.org. Old habits.)

Always Check the Intern’s Work

Now the part I will say twice. This tool is your intern, not your replacement. It is fast, eager, and occasionally, confidently wrong. Every link it hands you, you open. Every passage, you read, closer than you read your students’ work.

That isn’t a flaw in the tool. That’s the lesson. We spend our days teaching students to question sources, weigh evidence, and notice when a story tells only one side. We should model it. The version I built was told to verify every link, skip anything paywalled or purely partisan, and stop and suggest better topics when a story is too thin to cover honestly, rather than pad a lesson with weak sources. Good guardrails make a good assistant. But the final judgment is yours. And letting your students watch you exercise that judgment may be the most valuable part of the whole exercise.

Try It This Week: No Tool Required

You don’t have to build anything today to get the spirit of this. Take one current event your students are already buzzing about, and ask three questions at three levels:

  1. What happened, and who was involved? (recall)
  2. What evidence in the story supports that, and what was left out? (analysis)
  3. Do you agree with how it was handled? Defend your answer. (evaluation)

That’s differentiation in fifteen minutes, no tool required. And when you are ready to let the assistant carry the heavy stuff, everything you need is waiting right below this post: the video where I build the tool step by step so you can follow along, the how-to guide that walks you through every click, and the class reference template you fill in to make it your own.

The Real Promise

Good teaching doesn’t fail because teachers don’t care. It fails because there are thirty of them and one of you, and the day is only so long. The promise here isn’t a robot that teaches your class. It is a new skill you can pick up in an afternoon, and a few hours of every week handed back to you, whatever you teach, so the caring you already do can reach every student in the room.

Not someday. This week.

    Now…watch the tutorial video below, follow along…and go build your own tool! Future you will thank today you.