Hi everyone,

As we move through the term, we’re thrilled to see so many of you diving into TeachersAI and exploring its features to enhance your teaching experience. Your feedback has been invaluable in guiding our development, and today, I’m excited to share another significant milestone with you.

We’ve just rolled out Phase 1 of our marksbook, now live as the Subject Overview Pages! 🎉

With this new tool, you can now track tasks over time—such as a full semester—and view grades and scores for those tasks at a glance. The system also calculates an end-of-unit grade based on the completed tasks, giving you a clear picture of your students’ progress and achievements throughout the term.

Why This Matters

This marksbook feature represents a significant technical achievement. We’ve implemented complex algorithms to ensure that tasks are accurately linked to their respective assessments and that scores are dynamically displayed in the correct columns and rows. We’ve also integrated data validation processes to maintain the integrity of grade calculations, ensuring reflect the latest input. Additionally, our development team has worked on optimizing the database queries to improve the speed and reliability of data synchronization across the platform. Getting this foundational technology right is crucial before we can introduce even more advanced and helpful features.

Looking ahead, this technology is vital for our future plans. The implementation of the marksbook is a critical first step towards enabling AI-generated report comments. Without this system in place to accurately track and evaluate student performance over time, generating meaningful, automated report comments would not be possible. Although the marksbook is still in its early stages and there’s more work to be done, it lays the groundwork for transforming how teachers handle grading and report writing.

Our longer term vision is to reduce the often nearly hundreds of hours that teachers spend on writing report comments and grading, down to mere moments. The marksbook will eventually allow TeachersAI to automatically generate comprehensive report comments based on the work completed over a term or semester—all at the push of a button. This will streamline the reporting process, save you invaluable time, and ensure consistency in your assessments, allowing you to focus more on teaching and less on administrative tasks.

Your Feedback Matters

We’ve released this version of the marksbook to gather early feedback from our users. Your insights are essential as we continue to develop and refine this tool. We want to hear from you—what do you like about it? What features would you like to see added? Your input is invaluable in helping us shape this tool into something that truly meets your needs and fits seamlessly into your workflow.

While Phase 1 of the marksbook is somewhat simplistic in its presentation, this was a deliberate choice. A core design pillar we are aiming for is simplicity, ensuring that the tool is easy to use and not overwhelming. However, we understand that as you begin using the marksbook, there may be additional data and features you’d like to have readily accessible. This could include more detailed breakdowns of student performance, easy-to-access pop-up information, or additional columns for specific data points.

We are particularly interested in how you interact with the marksbook and what information you find most valuable. Would pop-up forms for detailed data be useful, or perhaps additional columns to track specific metrics? Maybe you envision a different way to present the data that would better support your teaching needs. Whatever it is, your feedback will help us tailor the marksbook to better serve you and your students.

Bug Fixes

As with any new feature release, we’ve encountered a few bugs along the way, but I’m pleased to report that our team has been hard at work addressing these issues. Here are the bugs we’ve recently sorted out:

1. Uploading Existing Rubrics: After the launch of the AI rubric creation tool, we discovered that user-made rubrics were not being uploaded correctly. This issue has now been resolved, and you should be able to seamlessly upload your premade rubrics into the system without any problems.
2. AI Feedback Generation: We identified and fixed a bug that was causing the AI to stop generating feedback halfway through its response. This issue has been resolved, and the AI should now consistently provide full feedback for student submissions.
3. AI Percentage Calculation Display: There was a bug where the AI-calculated percentage was not being displayed in the correct field, and in some cases, it was showing additional text along with the percentage. We’ve corrected this issue, so now the AI only displays the percentage in the appropriate field, ensuring clarity and accuracy in student assessments.

Known Issues

While we’ve made significant progress, there are still a few known issues that we are actively working to resolve:

1. Rubric Maker Content Descriptor Codes: The Rubric Maker is occasionally not retrieving the correct content descriptor codes from the curriculum, or in some cases, not displaying them at all. For example, if you’ve requested codes from the WA curriculum, you might notice that the codes provided do not align with that curriculum. We are aware of this issue and are working to ensure that the correct codes are pulled and displayed consistently.
2. Marksbook Percentage Calculation: We’ve identified that the marksbook is sometimes providing inaccurate final percentages for student assessments. This issue is currently being actively addressed by our team, and we are working on a fix to ensure that the percentage calculations are accurate and reliable.

YouTube Updates

We’ve recently updated many of our original tutorials to reflect the more recent content and improvements in TeachersAI. These updated videos are now live and available for you to explore. While these revisions cover a lot of ground, we’re also planning to add new videos specifically dedicated to the latest features, such as the rubric tool and the marksbook.

In addition to these updates, we’ll be creating longer-form videos that take users through the platform in more detail, providing step-by-step guidance. These videos will include audio commentary from myself to help walk you through the features and answer common questions. Our goal is to make sure you feel fully supported as you use TeachersAI.

Be sure to visit our YouTube channel to check out the updated tutorials and stay tuned for the new content coming soon!

Looking Ahead: The Future of TeachersAI

As we look to the future, I’m excited to share that our next major feature will be the Ask Anything chatbot, with the curriculum loaded into its memory. This powerful tool will allow you to query the curriculum and receive tailored, instant responses, making lesson planning and content alignment easier than ever before.

Beyond the chatbot, we have hundreds of ideas and opportunities to add content and make TeachersAI even more valuable for you. However, in the near term, we’ll be dedicating a significant portion of our development time to building the backend infrastructure for our schools account. This will enable administrators to set up accounts, manage classes, move students between classes, add and create tasks, and even share tasks across the school.

This is crucial technology that will take a lot of development effort, and we anticipate that coding for these features will occupy much of our time for the remainder of the year. While this is our main focus, rest assured that we will continue to post about any bugs we fix and smaller content updates that we patch into existing tools on the site.

Our goal is to make it easier for schools to get on board with TeachersAI, providing a seamless experience for administrators, teachers, and students alike.

If your school is interested in trialing our platform, please contact me directly. We’re already working with a number of high schools and primary schools that are seeing the benefits of TeachersAI, and we’d love to help your school experience the same.

Thank you for staying engaged with TeachersAI and for your continued support. We’re committed to making TeachersAI a powerful and user-friendly tool for educators everywhere. As always, your feedback is invaluable, so please keep sharing your thoughts as we continue to grow and improve together. Exciting things are on the horizon, and we’re thrilled to have you along for the journey.

Cheers,

Stuart