Courtnay Boateng (MEd) The honest answer to “is this for me” isn’t always yes. Most tools in this category answer that question with “everyone,” which is how you end up signing up for something on a Sunday and realising by Monday that it doesn’t do two of the three things you actually needed it to do. So here … Read more
I have ADHD, and no advice about finding more time has ever helped me. I’m Courtnay, one of CARL’s co-founders. I was diagnosed at 29, which means I spent my twenties assuming everyone found the start of a task this taxing and nobody talked about it. One thing before anything else, because it changes what … Read more
A companion to what I say before I teach anyone a prompt, which comes first. This one is what I actually teach. I facilitate workshops on using AI for planning, and the first thing I show people is more of a hack than anything else: use the AI to work out how to use the … Read more
“This feels like cheating.” I hear that more than anything else when I run these sessions, usually as soon as the room warms up enough for someone to say it out loud. It’s worth answering first, because nothing else I teach lands until it’s settled. Using AI to save time isn’t unethical. What matters is … Read more
Ask an image generator for “a doctor” or “a family” a few times, and you might notice the results start to look pretty similar. That’s just how these tools tend to work. Without much direction, they lean on a default. For most things, that default is harmless. For classroom materials, it isn’t. The images on … Read more
Most AI tools treat the lesson plan as the finish line. Type a topic, get a lesson, done. But the lesson plan was never the whole job. The job is everything around it that makes the lesson actually teachable: the activity students do, the supports for the kids who need them, the handout in their … Read more
I’ll be straight about something a lot of AI tools won’t: AI gets things wrong. Sometimes confidently. It can produce errors, bias, and convincing-sounding misinformation, and no amount of clever prompting fully removes that. So when people ask whether any AI tool is truly “safe,” I don’t think the honest answer is a flat yes. … Read more
Compass helps you see what’s next. CARL helps you build it. That’s the simplest way to explain how the two fit together. They’re connected, but they’re not the same thing, and that’s on purpose. Why Two Tools Instead of One We could have crammed everything into one big platform. We didn’t, because planning is really … Read more
AI should not replace teachers, create more expectations, or make every lesson start from scratch. Used well, it should reduce repetitive planning work so teachers have more room to teach, connect, or maybe just take a deep breath.
Fair question. If you can use ChatGPT to generate lesson ideas, activities, rubrics, and worksheets, why use something like CARL? Honestly, sometimes ChatGPT is enough. For a quick idea, a wording tweak, or help getting unstuck, a general AI tool is genuinely useful. I use AI all the time to brainstorm and turn messy thoughts … Read more
