One Good Thing – Episode 20 Teachally – Where AI meets LMS

Today’s episode focuses on another tool that’s been on my list for a long time, but I’ve only recently had the chance to truly dig into it – Teachally. This is an AI-powered lesson planning and classroom collaboration platform that puts instructional design at the forefront.

While it does offer one-click resource generation like other teacher toolkits, Teachally’s true strength lies in providing a structured, planning-focused approach that mirrors how many educators naturally prepare lessons. By centering the process on well-designed objectives tied to standards first, Teachally facilitates thoughtful lesson creation before bringing students directly into the collaborative workflow and also sharing work directly with colleagues. This appears to be the intersection here of AI with learning management systems and virtual learning environments.

In many ways, it resembles a cleaner and more user-friendly version of the Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom spaces. I’m quite a fan of Google Classroom myself, less so of the somewhat cluttered Teams interface. But Teacherly offers a very clear space, and what it does that many other platforms don’t is provide that direct collaboration space between teachers and students. You can create your lessons, generate resources within the application, and then share those materials directly with students. Because you’re creating and sharing in the same space, you don’t have to move things from one section to another or separately create assignments. The flow is just more logical than existing systems where you distribute your materials to students after creating them elsewhere. With Teacherly, you bring students into your distribution flow instead.

I think that’s quite a sensible way of approaching things.

What is the USP?

I believe its USP is allowing that planning flow, much like Almanack, to be foregrounded. So you’re thinking about what you’re teaching rather than what you’re teaching with. It focuses you on the planning aspect first. Once you’ve gone through planning, that’s when you start introducing the materials. This really isn’t designed for producing the bulk of your teaching materials itself. It has areas to upload your own materials, and it will add what are called “enrichments” where you can include some AI-generated tasks. But for the most part, this is a planning and collaboration tool.

The plans are created around a format of objective, introduction, application and independent practice – this is perfectly fine as a format, but may be a tad formulaic for certain contexts.

One key feature is the fact that this tool foregrounds skills and standards – this allows the lessons to be tailored to the specific learning outcomes. The AI component takes your content prompt and combines it with the standards you can draw from the existing curricula that are uploaded (US as far as I could tell) or even add your own, so when I played around with a demo lesson I just added a UK national curriculum objective manually. The lesson generated from here was not a bad example and you can edit any of the sections manually.

Once you have generated the lesson you can then add in resources of your own in the form of pre-existing material you have in your planning banks, links to websites and YouTube videos.

You can also generate ‘enrichments’ – microtasks that can expand the lesson or add extra materials or extension tasks. Again the output here is editable so you can fine tune it.

However, it’s not even this that sets Teachally apart. It’s the fact that this then works collaboratively with students and staff. Once created both lessons and standards can be shared and lessons can be assigned directly. As a subject and faculty lead I can really see how useful this could be.

Not only is the planning and lesson assignment shared, but there are data collection tools and communication tools as well. I haven’t really explored these as I haven’t run the platform live, but given that I’m currently working with four different systems – one for setting homework, one for registers, reporting and communication, one for data tracking and a completely separate VLE – an integrated system like this makes a lot of sense.

The downsides?

As with many of these tools there is no easy way to iterate your initial prompt if the output is not what you want. You can regenerate with a more developed prompt, but this produces fresh content, although not so far removed from your initial ideas it can be frustrating if a completely different task replaces one you actually rather liked – in this case you need to copy the individual components and reintroduce them later.

This means that for me, much of the usefulness of the LLM is lost and whilst I like the architecture and the structure of the system I’m frustrated that I can iterate and change.

Still, I think Teachally does have some worthwhile utility.

Would I use it at this point in my career? Perhaps not.

But is it something I might recommend to others? Yes, if this kind of planning-focused framing is appealing. I think where this could really work well is if an entire department or school adopts it, since it’s designed for sharing with students and parents. Then you’d need to look at how to effectively apply it and bring it to your target students and community.

So, Teacherly is definitely worth taking a look at as this is one of those use cases where staying focused on the planning aspect gives it longevity.

Please let me know what you think of this platform if you have used it or think it might be of use.

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