The useful work for AI sits outside the classroom: the unit plan, the resources, the marking scaffolds and the admin. This guide follows one term in order and marks what stays with you.
Lesson planning is where a lot of teachers start. In the OECD’s TALIS 2024 survey of lower-secondary teachers, released in October 2025, 66% of Australian teachers had used AI in their work in the previous 12 months, against an OECD average of 36%. Among the Australian teachers who used it, the most common uses were generating lesson plans or activities and learning about and summarising a topic, each reported by 71% of them.
The same survey puts full-time lower-secondary teachers in Australia at 8.4 hours a week preparing lessons, against an OECD average of 7.4. Those hours are spread over the whole term, so this guide follows one in order.
Start with the document you’ll keep returning to. Give the tool what a colleague would need to write it with you: the year level, the curriculum outcomes in your system’s own wording, the number of lessons, the assessment date and what the class already knows.
A prompt that works:
It opens in the Document editor, so you change the order of lessons, cut the one you know won’t work with this class, and leave comments for the colleague who teaches the parallel class. Track changes keeps a record of who changed what.
If your school has a unit or lesson plan template, write it once as a Skill: the headings, the order, what every plan must include. Attach the Skill and plans come back in your school’s shape without you pasting the template again.
This is where the hours go, because one lesson needs several things and each one used to be a separate job.
Check every resource before it reaches a student. AI writes wrong facts in the same confident sentence as right ones, and a worksheet error gets copied by thirty students.
Differentiation is where the extra hours usually go. Once the core worksheet exists, the variations are quick:
Notice what that prompt leaves out. “Students reading two years below level” gives the tool everything it needs to write Level 1. Which students they are, and what their learning plans say, stays in your school’s systems.
For revision, ask for flash cards on the unit’s key terms. They open as a deck in the Flash Cards editor, where you can flip cards, mark the ones you know and run a multiple-choice quiz mode built from the same deck. Add your own cards, then print the set for the class.
AI is useful for the scaffolding around assessment and a poor substitute for the assessment itself.
Good jobs for it:
The grade stays with you. In the same TALIS results, 15% of Australian lower-secondary teachers who used AI used it to assess or mark student work, against 26% of AI-using teachers on the OECD average. Whatever the tool drafts, the professional judgement is yours, and so is the conversation with a parent who asks why.
Every term ends with writing that has nothing to do with teaching: the newsletter paragraph, the excursion note, the permission form, the handover note for a relief teacher. These are the safest jobs to hand over because they rarely need student information. Draft the excursion note as a document, turn the permission slip into a fillable PDF, and keep the relief-teacher handover as a template you update each term.
| Moment in the term | What you ask for | Where it opens | What stays with you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before term | Unit plan from outcomes and constraints | Document | Sequencing for this class |
| Week before | Deck, worksheet, visual lesson, video | Slide, Document to PDF, Visual Learner, Video | Checking every fact |
| In the room | Three reading levels, flash cards, practice tool | Document, Flash Cards, Custom Tool | Knowing which student gets which |
| After the task | Rubric, comment bank, grade book | Document, Sheet | The grade |
| End of term | Newsletter, excursion note, permission form | Document, PDF | Anything that names a student |
Your school or system sets these, and they apply to every AI tool you use, this one included.
Never put information that identifies a student (names, photos, assessment results, learning plans, wellbeing notes) into any AI tool unless your school or system’s policy allows that specific tool for that specific use. Work from descriptions instead of records. If your policy does allow student writing to be analysed, remove names and other identifying details first.
That rule is about what you’re permitted to put in, and your school decides it. How Oppermind collects, stores and uses what you enter is a separate question, answered in our privacy policy.
For a general overview of privacy obligations when a business uses AI, see the Privacy Act section of our guide to AI workers. Your school or system will know which privacy law applies to it. General information only, not legal advice. Your school or system’s policy and your own legal obligations take precedence.
As an example of how education systems frame this, Australia’s education ministers agreed the Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools in October 2023, and it was released that December. The National AI in Schools Taskforce carried out a 2024 review of it, which ministers endorsed in June 2025. It sets six principles, including one on accountability and one on privacy, security and safety, supported by 25 guiding statements. Other systems publish their own guidance, and your school’s policy is the one that applies to you. General information about published guidance, not education policy or legal advice. Check the current version with your school or system.
Oppermind is not approved or endorsed by any education department or school system. Whichever guidance applies, a tool can draft and suggest. Decisions about a student, and the accountability for them, stay with the teacher.
In TALIS 2024, about seven in ten lower-secondary teachers on the OECD average agreed that AI could enable students to misrepresent others’ work as their own (Education International’s summary of the results puts it at 72%). Tell students which tasks allow AI and how students should acknowledge it, and build some evidence of process into assessment: drafts, an in-class component, a short conversation about the work.
Oppermind is an AI workspace where each of the jobs above ends as a file in a proper editor: documents, sheets, decks, PDFs, videos, animations, flash cards, visual lessons and small interactive tools. That matters for teaching because almost nothing an AI drafts is ready for a class, and fixing one wrong question in an editor takes seconds where re-running a prompt takes minutes. Unlimited documents, spreadsheets, decks and designs on every plan. Images, video and voiceovers have daily limits that depend on the plan.
Oppermind is for adults (18 and over), so it’s a workspace for your preparation, not an account for your students. What reaches students is a printout, a PDF or whatever is on the class screen.
Plans are Free with no card, Starter A$9.95, Pro A$29.99 and Pro Plus A$59.99 a month. Try it on next week’s worksheet before anything else.
Whatever you’re here to make, make more of it.
Nothing here makes a resource correct. The tool doesn’t know your class, the version of the curriculum your school teaches or what your school’s policy permits, and it can state a wrong fact as confidently as a right one. The time it saves is in the first draft. The checking stays with you.
And if your school or system hasn’t cleared an AI tool for the work you have in mind, start by asking whoever looks after digital policy.
It can draft them quickly if you give it the year level, outcomes, number of lessons and what the class already knows. The sequencing decisions for your class are still yours, so treat the draft as a starting point.
That’s your school or system’s call, per tool and per use. If you’re not sure, the answer for now is no. Ask whoever looks after digital policy at your school before you start.
It can draft a rubric, a comment bank and exemplars. The grade is a professional judgement. In TALIS 2024, Australian lower-secondary teachers who used AI were less likely than the OECD average to use it to assess or mark student work (15% against 26%).
Only as well as your brief. Paste the outcomes in your system’s own wording and check the draft against them, because the tool can’t know which version of a curriculum your school teaches.
Unit plans, resources, flash cards and marking scaffolds as files you can edit, in one workspace.