Missives from Samsara

I’ll admit it: I get an unreasonable amount of excitement about AI tools built for teachers specifically, as opposed to the general-purpose chatbots most of us have added into our workflow over the past few years. So when Anthropic announced Claude for Teachers earlier this month, I read the whole press release like it was last night’s Rush set list.

Here’s their pitch, as best I can tell. Claude for Teachers is free for verified K-12 educators for at least a year, and it’s built around a partnership called Learning Commons, which maps academic standards across all fifty states down to the specific skills and sequences underneath them. In theory, that means when you ask it to draft a lesson plan, it’s pulling from an actual scaffold of what kids are supposed to know and when, as opposed to simply generating something plausible-sounding. Anthropic is also folding in Claude Code and Cowork, so teachers could theoretically use it for bigger tasks, like combing through student data or automating something that repeats every week.

I find I have my usual skepticism about any tech company claiming to close the gap between best practices and what a teacher’s week allows. We teachers have heard that line before. But the emphasis here is a little different than the last wave of ed-tech AI. Instead of being aimed at students, it is aimed at the person standing in front of the room trying to differentiate instruction for 28 kids on a Tuesday afternoon with emails to answer and work to grade. Task overwhelm is a real problem for educators, and if a tool can genuinely lighten the load, I’m interested.

Where things get murkier is whether I’ll actually get to use it. My district runs on Google, and like most public school systems, we’ve got an approved list of software that reflects understandable caution these days. Anthropic says they’ve built in FERPA-aligned data protections and that teacher conversations aren’t used to train the model, which is reassuring, but “reassuring” and “cleared by our tech department” are two different things. I have no idea whether Claude for Teachers will make it onto our list, or how long that might take.

Assuming I do get the green light eventually, I can already think of uses. In my elective Sports History, standards-aligned lesson planning would save real time on a daily basis. I’d also like to see what it does with differentiation, since I’ve got students reading four grade levels apart in the same room, and building truly different versions of an assignment by hand eats time I don’t have. And if the Cowork side can help me sort through exit tickets and assessment data with reduced stress, that alone might be worth the sign-up.

So consider this a placeholder post. I’m cautiously hopeful. If tools like this actually deliver on giving teachers back the hours we spend on the invisible half of the job, that’s a huge win, not just for me but for my students, who benefit every time I’m less exhausted. I’ll report back once I know whether I’m allowed to touch it.

At this point in my teaching career it is abundantly clear that organization is critically important. When I have student teachers I emphasize organization, both digital and physical. Hight school teachers have no secretaries, interface with well over 100 teenagers a day (not to mention their coworkers and parents), and cope with quite a bit of paper that is both going out to the kids and coming in for grading.

Several years ago I came across a teacher’s website online and he had a Google Doc that was a hub for all the resources he’d need to do his job. I immediately saw the wisdom of such a thing and knew that it fit my personality. Below is a screenshot of what my current Resources Dashboard looks like. The links go staight the document in my Drive or to the website. I have this pinned on the top of my work and personal Chrome browsers to that it is only a click away if I am online anywhere.

Once it is built it is easily updated each year depending on changes to teaching assignments. I know every teacher organizes their digital lives differently, but if I were an administrator, I’d strongly recommend all my staff make something like this.