Empowering Educators: Generative AI Trends For K12 Teachers
Top trends and insights from The Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map research process about how Generative AI is transforming Teacher Practice Support and Teacher Professional Learning
Teach and assess skills and competencies beyond domain knowledge through approaches that prioritize practical abilities and measurable real-world outcomes
GenAI for Educators: The Ultimate Solution or Another Challenge?
Since GenAI’s emergence in 2022, entrepreneurs have leveraged its expanding capabilities to tackle a range of problems—from routine tasks to breakthrough discoveries. Scientists, for instance, use tools like Perplexity and Elicit to streamline literature reviews, while Google’s Co-Scientist recently solved a decade-old medical mystery about antibiotic resistance in just two days.
Educators, too, face dual challenges that AI could help address: overwhelming workloads and systemic barriers to progress.
Excessive Workload
The teaching profession is marked by its excessive workload. One Education Week survey found that teachers put in a median of 54 hours per week, putting them at the very top of the bell curve among all professions. The huge workload and administrative burden of teaching is one of the main contributors to educator burnout, second only to salary complaints (McKinsey).
Systemic Challenges
Beyond paperwork, teachers must navigate deep-seated societal and cultural issues:
Low pay and social status
Student poverty and absenteeism
Behavioral challenges – 68% of elementary and middle school teachers handle behavior issues daily (Pew).
Rising student anxiety and depression
Technology’s impact – 72% of high school teachers cite cell phone distractions as a major issue (Pew).
Racial inequities – Disparities in funding, discipline, expectations, and educator representation persist.
Academic Struggles
If these weren’t enough, student performance remains a major concern—especially post-pandemic. The latest NAEP results show 33% of eighth graders reading below a basic level, a low not seen since 1971.
On the Bright Side…
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. 71% of teachers report having excellent relationships with their colleagues and more than half even have strong relationships with their administrators (Pew), on par with how most American workers feel about their bosses (Pew). High school graduation rates have risen for years, now hovering around 87% (NCES). Many educators have a good amount of autonomy in how and what they teach, allowing them to convey their passions to generations of young people, and teachers cite their relationships with students, ‘lightbulb moments’ and the lasting impact of their work as some of the most rewarding aspects of their work (Edweek).
That said, all of these factors and more make today’s teaching roles incredibly challenging, and the critical question remains: how can Generative AI meaningfully support educators rather than becoming another "flavor of the month" initiative or, worse, undermining teacher morale and job security? The potential exists for AI to address both daily pain points and transformative challenges—if implemented thoughtfully.
AI Tool Suites Are Quickly Evolving To Meet Educator Needs
One of the largest types of Teacher Practice Support tools is AI Tool Suites for Teachers and Learners, including tools like Magic School, Brisk Teaching, SchoolAI, Quizzizz and Formative, among a growing number of others. These AI-driven platforms often begin with a handful of core educator-focused functions but quickly evolve into comprehensive toolkits, incorporating dozens of specialized features designed to address increasingly specific classroom needs.
As AI tools for teachers (like these all-in-one tool suites) and for students become more accessible, schools are reconsidering their approach to academic integrity. Traditional concerns about plagiarism have expanded to include questions about appropriate AI use, prompting a reassessment of student evaluation methods. Established edtech companies that offer security, proctoring, white labelling or plagiarism detection (like Turnitin or Grammarly) have been consistently enhancing their AI detection capabilities, and a new crop of AI-first tools (Honorlock, GPTZero and Copyleaks) have emerged.
In technological arms races, I usually bet on the younger generations, and observers like Ethan Mollick have consistently questioned whether it is truly possible to detect AI generation at scale.
In any case, this rapid dual evolution — productivity and creativity suites for teachers and the arms race of integrity tooling — reflects the complex reality on the ground, in which supporting productive AI use and ensuring academic integrity must develop in parallel.
Classroom Example: Ms. Rivera initially adopted an AI platform for grading essays. The system has grown to include lesson planning, differentiated practice generation, and parent communication. Meanwhile, her school's existing academic integrity system has evolved to help her understand when and how students are using AI in their work, providing insights rather than just detection.
Data to Turbocharge and Unify Student Support
Education systems generate a huge amount of data, and the days of the paper gradebook are mostly behind us. Teachers are now asked — and often expected — to act like data scientists, putting together a variety of data points about learners to differentiate instruction, support IEPs and 504 plans, communicate with instructional teams, admins and families, and generate defensible grades that can stand up to even the most helicopters of parents.
Edtech tools often add to this datastorm. According to the 2024 LearnPlatform report, teachers use an average of 49 unique tools throughout the school year, many with their own siloed dashboards and reports.
AI systems like Doowii, Strived.io and Schoolytics are working to help schools better coordinate student support by connecting previously siloed data sources, synthesizing information from academic performance, attendance, behavioral observations, and specialist reports to create comprehensive views of student needs. Tools like Eedi and Edia focus on math data to identify and aggregate student misconceptions and needs across classrooms and provide MTSS support.
Schoolytics brings together attendance, behavioral, well being, testing and proficiency data into a single dashboard
Doowii provides AI interfaces that generate reports and insights
Classroom Example: When Marcus's English performance begins to decline, the AI system identifies correlations between his recent challenges, attendance patterns, and notes from his IEP meetings. It automatically generates insights that help his core teachers, reading specialist, and family coordinate their support efforts. Rather than each stakeholder working with partial information, everyone shares a unified view of Marcus's challenges and progress.
Expanding the Scope of Educator Support and Assessment
AI tools are helping formalize and enhance teachers' ability to support students across multiple dimensions of development, beyond proficiency in particular subjects. Several skills-based assessment platforms like Muzzy Lane, Bodyswaps and Genius Academy come from the higher education and workforce development world, AI tools like NXTLVL, and Mindprint Learning use AI to assess and teach the underlying ‘durable’ skills, strategies and competencies (e.g., problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration) that have always been part of good teaching but often remained informal or invisible.
NXTLVL combines gamification and skill-based learning for elementary school students
Classroom Example: Ms. Thompson's AI assessment system helps her track not just students' historical knowledge, but also their development in critical thinking, communication, and social-emotional skills. When the system identifies a group of students who may need support in collaboration and creative problem solving, she creates a group project that allows them to work interdependently to solve a real world problem. This comprehensive view helps her support her students’ development across multiple dimensions, making visible the kind of holistic support good teachers have always tried to provide.
Teacher Presence Multiplication Through AI Avatars
Emerging avatar-creation technologies, many of which are designed for industries far outside of education (think sales, marketing, customer success, or telehealth) are providing novel ways for teachers to extend their instructional presence beyond physical and linguistic limitations, creating personalized content delivery systems that maintain their individual teaching styles. Heygen, Synthesia and Collosyan are in constant competition to make the most realistic human avatars that can speak any text in any language, while Prof Jim converts text interactive instructional videos with any teacher at the helm.
Classroom teachers have been making their own videos for years. They do it for a variety of reasons: in service of a “flipped classroom” model, to provide general additional out-of-class support, asynchronous online learning courses, or becoming teacher creators to meet kids where they are (and even reach social media stardom). Ultra-realistic (or, cartoon versions of) teacher avatars have the potential to take these endeavors to the next level. Teachers can create entire catalogs of online videos directly from their text curriculum, create videos in any language, and reduce the cost of video creation dramatically. HeyGen’s real-time interactive avatar feature allows teachers to provide themselves as on-demand virtual tutors.
Classroom Example: Mr. Chen creates his digital avatar to produce a library of physics concept explanations. Students can access "Mr. Chen" explaining atomic structure during evening study sessions, complete with his characteristic teaching style and physics puns. During class time, he focuses on complex interactions while his avatar handles routine explanations.
AI for Teacher Professional Development
Finally, there are a number of companies looking to leverage AI for teacher professional development (AKA “professional learning” or “professional growth”). This is one area in which some of the trends in AI for workforce development might be a useful guide. We may expect to see:
Realistic Job Simulations: As Laurence Holt notes in the Gen AI Tools database writeup: “Simulators are increasingly widely used for training pilots, surgeons, and even CEOs; why not teachers?”
Just-in-Time Data-Driven Training: Just as a sales professional or executive will soon expect to get data-based feedback right after their last call or meeting, teachers might soon expect to get instructional coaching and (private) recommendations at the end of each class through tools like TeachFX, informed directly by data patterns.
Surfacing of Best Practices from Research: AI is excellent at pulling insights out of vast quantities of research, whether the research is on oncology or education. Thousands of findings and ideas from education research (“should student groups be mixed ability”, “what are effective ways to teach algebra to dyslexic students”) are suddenly ripe for the picking.
Classroom Example: A teacher in his first year of on-the-job work is equipped with a data-driven feedback tool that has live access to all class time. At the end of each class, the teacher receives feedback on what is going well and what could be improved. On a quarterly basis, higher level reports are provided to set goals, track growth, and support entry into the teaching workforce.
What’s Next: AI as Relationship Enabler
If the idea of students learning from videos of teachers rather than the real thing has you feeling queasy about the future of human relationships, fear not. Rather than replacing human connection, the next generation of teacher AI tools are likely to be designed to create more space for relationship building, both by handling routine tasks and providing real-time insight during student interactions.
Remember that Edweek study that found that teachers work 54 hours a week? Well, only half of a teacher’s time is spent teaching, with the other half comprising a wide variety of administrative tasks:
Teachers spend as much time “doing general administrative work” (not including grading or planning) as they do on “non-teaching student interaction.” If AI could save grading, planning, and admin time (as the tool suites certainly offer) this is time that could be used for relationship building. Combined with the holistic data synthesis capabilities of AI, there is a world, if we can make it, in which teachers have significantly more quality time to spend with their students.
While the key certainly lies in equitable implementation and distribution, at Edtech Insiders we’re hopeful that tools like these can support teachers to do less “have to-do’s” (admin work, grading, tedious reporting) and more of what they do best: connecting with learners and teaching.
Classroom Example: During one-on-one sessions, Ms. Roberts uses an AI dashboard that quietly displays relevant information about each student's progress and interests. Because AI handles routine grading and prep work, she has time to notice Sophia's recent interest in the WNBA and naturally weaves sports statistics into their math discussion.
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Release Recap: The Updated Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map
This week’s article is a part of our updated release of The Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map! We have been sharing a TON of deep dive information and behind the scenes insights from this project, and we are wrapping up our second release now!
Top trends and insights from The Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map research process about how Generative AI is transforming Instructional Materials, including:
Expanding What Can Be Assessed
Accelerating the Feedback Loop
Infinite “Personalized” Practice Assessments
What’s Next: Building Comprehensive Learning Pictures!
To celebrate the updated release of The Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map, Alex Sarlin joined by three founders and thought leaders in the AI education landscape lead a discussion on the current and future trends we're seeing in K12 AI use cases. Guests included:
After an incredible experience at last year's inaugural Summit, where we recorded live conversations with icons and leaders like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sam Altman, we're excited to return to San Francisco for the second annual Common Sense Summit on Kids and Families (March 24-25, 2025).
This extraordinary gathering brings together leaders from education, technology, policy, and advocacy to explore how we can better serve children and families in the 21st century. Confirmed speakers already include Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic, former Secretary of Education John King, award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and other leaders shaping the intersection of education, policy, and media and technology.
As an Edtech Insiders member, you can use code EDTECH10 for 10% off your registration fee!
How is AI transforming educational games? Join industry experts from Roblox, Minecraft Education, and more as we explore AI-powered game development, gamification, and teacher-driven game creation.
Topics include:
Open-world learning & AI’s role in platforms like Minecraft & Roblox
AI-driven game development for engagement & scalability
Empowering educators to create AI-powered learning experiences
Moving beyond gamification to adaptive, personalized learning
Register now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of AI in education!
The Edtech Insiders Happy Hour at ASU-GSV has become an annual tradition bringing together edtech entrepreneurs, educators, investors, and system leaders. We are grateful to have Google, StartEd, Magic Edtech, Penn GSE, and EDT & Partners as co-hosts, along with our season sponsors Cooley and Tuck Advisors. This should be an amazing event to connect with edtech friends new and old!
Registration for this event will open soon. Edtech Insiders+ members will get priority access to tickets.
For now, mark you calendars and keep your eyes peeled for our registration drop!
This edition of the Edtech Insiders Newsletter is sponsored byTuck Advisors.
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1. OpenAI Launches $50M Grant Program to Fund Academic Research
OpenAI has announced the launch of NextGenAI, a consortium formed in partnership with 15 leading research institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and the University of Oxford. Supported by a $50 million commitment from OpenAI, the initiative aims to accelerate AI-assisted research and transform education by providing grants, computational resources, and API access to students, educators, and researchers.
A recent report by Common Sense Media reveals that children are engaging with screens at increasingly younger ages, with approximately 40% of toddlers owning their own tablet devices by age two. This early exposure has sparked discussions among parents and experts regarding the potential implications for child development and the importance of monitoring screen usage.
OpenAI's recent report reveals that over one-third of U.S. college-aged individuals use ChatGPT, with approximately 25% of their interactions focused on academic purposes. However, adoption rates vary significantly across states, with higher usage in California, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York, and lower rates in Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and West Virginia. This disparity may influence future workforce productivity and economic development, prompting recommendations to enhance AI literacy, broaden access, and implement supportive policies.
Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. released a comprehensive edtech, emphasizing the increasing integration of digital tools in classrooms, the rise of personalized learning platforms, and the growing importance of data analytics in shaping educational strategies. It also discusses challenges such as ensuring equitable access and addressing data privacy concerns.
5. Estonia and OpenAI to Bring ChatGPT to Schools Nationwide
Estonia is collaborating with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT Edu into its national education system, starting with 10th and 11th graders by September 2025. This initiative aims to enhance AI literacy among students and teachers, providing tools for personalized learning and efficient teaching practices.
Cooley LLP is the go-to law firm for edtech innovators, from early childhood through workforce. Informed by decades of experience in the education vertical, Cooley created the first edtech practice to provide industry-informed, business-minded counsel to companies and organizations at all stages of the corporate lifecycle. Cooley provides a multidisciplinary approach to client needs, offering seamless collaboration across offices and practices.
To learn more about what Cooley can do for you, reach out to Naomi May.
Unlike traditional internships, degree apprenticeships blend on-the-job training with formal education, allowing students to earn college credit while working and getting paid. This model, already established in parts of Europe, is now gaining traction in the U.S.
"You want to become a data scientist and gain a master's degree? You can do a degree apprenticeship in data science at the master’s level. That’s the type of program we’re building." — Pierre Dubuc
2. Overcoming Barriers to Apprenticeship Adoption in the U.S.
Many companies and learners in the U.S. are unfamiliar with apprenticeships, often confusing them with internships or trade-based programs. Additionally, regulatory hurdles and funding complexities slow down widespread adoption. However, public-private partnerships and state-level initiatives are helping bridge this gap.
"Sometimes it's also very useful to reskill or upskill existing employees. Apprenticeship is really efficient for that. But in many companies, it’s still a totally new thing—it’s building a new category." — Pierre Dubuc
3. AI’s Role in Personalized Learning & Job Placement
OpenClassrooms is leveraging AI-powered companions to enhance learning, while also using AI to match students to job opportunities based on their skills and career goals. These tools accelerate job placement and optimize career pathways by analyzing real-time labor market data.
"We know a lot about you as a candidate—your skills, location, degrees—so we match you with jobs in real time, even applying on your behalf with your consent to maximize opportunities." — Pierre Dubuc
4. Building a More Accessible & Affordable Higher Education System
Traditional higher education is expensive, rigid, and disconnected from workforce needs. Degree apprenticeships provide a debt-free alternative, allowing students to earn while they learn. However, funding models must evolve to ensure public dollars support high-impact, career-aligned programs.
"We need to define what quality means in education. Is it just getting a degree? Or is it about getting a job, a good job, and tracking real impact? That’s where we need better systems." — Pierre Dubuc
Curious to Learn More?
You can listen to our full interview with Pierre Dubuc, as well as interviews with many other edtech founders, investors, and thought leaders at The Edtech Insiders Podcast! Check it out, and as always, we’d love to hear what you think!
