How AI Can Help You Prepare for the New Academic Year
The start of a new academic year brings a fresh set of priorities and a significant increase in workload. The first few weeks of September are typically spent mapping out a host of tasks, including preparations for new classes, curriculum planning, lesson development and resource creation.
How can you manage this and prepare in advance while still making the most of your summer break?
TeacherMatic’s suite of 150+ AI tools can support teachers across different stages of their new-term planning, while also working together to create more connected resources.
A curriculum plan can inform a lesson; that lesson can become a presentation and a set of assessment questions, and completed lessons can provide the basis for future recap activities.
The following is an example of what that might look like for a teacher preparing a new KS3 Science unit on Cells and Organisation. You can use these TeacherMatic AI tools for any subject, topic or learning level to suit your needs.
Map Out the New Term with a New Scheme of Work/Curriculum Plan
The Scheme of Work/Curriculum Plan generator provides a starting point for comprehensive planning, enabling you to:
- Create week-by-week content for a complete course, shorter course or individual unit
- Build progression into a new unit
- Work from an existing specification or Scheme of Work
- Adapt the plan around your timetable, learners and curriculum requirements
Once this is in place, you can make a seamless transition from what you are teaching this term to what you’re teaching in the next lesson.
Turn Your Curriculum Plan into Lesson Plans
Now that your first week is mapped out, the next step is to turn that plan into a lesson with the Lesson Plan generator, with activities, timings and resources.
To generate optimal, relevant results, teachers can provide additional information about their learners, teaching approaches and curriculum requirements.
This generator can help you:
- Move from curriculum planning to individual lessons more quickly
- Create a first draft rather than starting with an empty page
- Build activities and timings around specific learning objectives
- Consider learner needs and teaching approaches during planning
- Refine and adapt the result to suit your own classroom
To ensure teachers retain full oversight, all activities, resources and timings can be reviewed and refined before they are delivered to your learners.
Now that a lesson has been planned and structured, you can create the resources you need for it.
Build Your Lesson Resources with a PowerPoint Presentation
Creating classroom presentations can take considerable preparation time, particularly when you are developing several new lessons for different classes and/or year groups.
With the PowerPoint Presentation generator, you can draft an editable slide deck based on the topic and learning objectives of your choice.
This generator enables you to:
- Turn lesson objectives into a structured presentation
- Prepare resources for your first lessons before term gets busy
- Create an editable PowerPoint rather than building every slide from scratch
- Add relevant imagery where available
- Personalise the finished presentation around your teaching style and class
With the curriculum, lesson and presentation taking shape, you can use the next generator to improve your students’ spatial memory and retention.
Prepare Knowledge Checks with Multiple Choice Questions
Start creating questions and answers around a chosen topic using keywords or by providing more detailed supporting material, as shown in the KS3 Science example.
With the Multiple-choice questions generator, you can refine the generated results before delivering these as fun and engaging ‘knowledge checks’ for classroom and homework recap activities.
This generator can help you:
- Prepare retrieval and formative assessment activities in advance
- Create questions around the content you’re already planning
- Check understanding before progressing to the next topic
- Include plausible incorrect answers to explore misconceptions
- Save and refine useful question sets for future lessons
Here is another generator that is ideal for bringing your lesson content together.
Make Lesson Connections with a Start of Lesson Recap
Maintain this back-to-school momentum by encouraging your learners to recall the previous lesson’s knowledge using something you already have to hand: the previous lesson plan.
The Start of Lesson Recap generator allows you to upload previous lesson plans or paste lesson descriptions to identify key learning that can be revisited at the beginning of the next session.
This generator can help you:
- Revisit important knowledge from the previous lesson
- Build continuity across a sequence of lessons
- Create recap activities from planning you have already completed
- Identify knowledge gaps before introducing new content
- Reinforce prior learning throughout the new term
Five Different Areas of September Preparation, One Workflow
Each of these generators has a distinct purpose, but using them together demonstrates how AI can support connected planning and more efficient teaching workflows, such as:
- Map the unit with the Scheme of Work/Curriculum Plan
- Prepare individual lessons with the Lesson Plan
- Create supporting slides with the PowerPoint Presentation
- Prepare checks for understanding with Multiple Choice Questions
- Connect one lesson to the next with the Start of Lesson Recap
Instead of using AI for isolated tasks, you can support different stages of a planning process you are already familiar with, saving even more of your valuable teaching time.
Ready to Lighten Your September Workload?
Log in to your TeacherMatic account to start using these TeacherMatic AI generators and more.
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Sign up now to access these generators and 150+ AI tools for your back-to-school strategy.
For implementing AI support across your entire organisation, contact the TeacherMatic team to discuss your specific requirements.
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