Almanack is an AI-powered platform that helps teachers create engaging and interactive lessons. It offers access to a wide variety of educational AI tools that facilitate both teaching and administrative tasks. Drawing on its AI technology, teachers can easily generate engaging lesson plans and add different resources such as slides, videos, worksheets, rubrics, in-classroom activities and games, and many more.
Almanack offers an AI generator for almost any teaching task from creating worksheets and rubrics to generating feedback and report card comments. The process is simple and easy and all you have got to do is to select your course and lesson and let AI do the rest. Of course, you can always (and you should) edit and customize any AI-generated content before you use it with your students.
Generating Lessons Using AI
Almanack content is organized around the idea of courses and lessons. When you use Almanack for the first time, you will need to create a course (e.g., Social Studies) then you can add as many lessons and units to it as you want. In a sense, “courses are containers that bind units and lessons together.”
Lessons, on the other hand, is where you get to add your resources and activities. A typical lesson on Almanack contains the following elements: a lesson plan, standards or curriculum expectations, learning objectives, and resources. To create a course, login to your Almanack account, click on Lesson Planning on the left hand side and follow the instructions there. Once your lesson is created you can then add resources to it.
Almanack AI Resources
Almanack provides you with various resource types to add to your lesson namely YouTube video, slide deck, and worksheet. For instance, when you click on the YouTube video option you will be provided with a curated selection of YouTube videos pertaining to the topic of your lesson. Select the videos you are interested in and click on ‘Attach to lesson’ and they will be automatically added to the resources section of your lesson.
Other resources you can add to your lessons include files, PDFs, web links. You can also use Almanack’s AI to generate various other types of resources including: Flashcards, Study Guides, quizzes and tests, group activities, rubrics, translations, jeopardy games, critical thinking questions, graphic organizers, exit tickets, and many more.
Almanack AI Tools
Almanack offers a wide variety of educational AI tools to help facilitate your teaching.
I went through the collection they have there and selected those that are popular among teachers. The way these AI tools work is more or less similar: Click on the tool you want to use then select your lesson from the drop-down menu.
You need to at least create one lesson to start using these AI tools. Here is a list of some popular AI tools in Almanack:
- Video Recommendations: Use this AI tool to help you instantly find educational videos related to the topic of your lesson.
- Slide Decks: Generate a formatted slide deck with images.
- Worksheets: Create a customized worksheet that covers a full range of topics for grades 3-12.
- Quizzes and Tests: Choose from multiple choice, fill-in-the-blanks, diagram labeling questions and more.
- Jeopardy: Create Jeopardy for the classroom.
- K-2 Worksheets: Comprehension, writing practice, cut-and-paste activity for lower grades.
- Group Activities: Engage your students with a group activity based on their interests.
- Flashcards: Create flashcards to help students review key concepts and terms.
Report Cards
The Report Cards feature enable you to easily generate comments and feedback on students work. There are pre-made templates to use to simplify the process of report-writing and you can customize them the way you want. However, the Report Cards feature is only available for premium users. If you are a free user you are only allowed ‘to preview the feature by creating one report card project with one course and a limited number of students.’
Almanack Integrations
One of the strengths of Almanack is its integrations with numerous tools and platforms including Google Docs, Google Slides, Word, PowerPoint, Google Forms, Quizlet, Kahoot, Blooket, Gimkit, Quizizz, and more.
This means that anything lesson and resources you create on Almanack can be easily exported in different file formats to the supported platform of your choice. For instance, you can generate quizzes and tests on Almanack and export them to ‘a variety of formats compatible with third-party tools.’
Almanack alternatives include: Brisk Teaching, Eduaide, and Curipod
Ways to use Almanack in Your Teaching
- Here are some practical suggestions on how to use Almanack in your teaching:
- Facilitate administrative tasks: Almanack offers access to a number of key AI tools to help you with that including rubric generator, report card commnets writer, and feedback generator.
- Plan comprehensive lessons: Almanack allows you to generate comprehensive lesson plans and courses. you can organize your teaching into different courses and lessons with customizable templates for lesson plans, learning objectives, and standards.
- Generate lesson resources: This is one of the powerful features in Almanack. With a single click you can generate a wide variety of educational resources to enrich your lessons including slides, videos, graphic organizers, rubrics, games, in-class activities, and many more
- Facilitate personalized learning: Almanack’s AI tools allow you to create different learning resources (e.g., flashcards, quizzes, study guides, worksheets) tailored to individual student needs and learning goals.
- Support differentiated instruction: Use features like group activities, translations, and Jeopardy games to cater to diverse student preferences and abilities.
- Enhance group work: Use Almanack’s group activity generator to design team-based learning experiences.
Final thoughts
Almanack is a powerful AI teaching assistant. You can use it to help facilitate both your teaching and administrative tasks. Almanack offers access to a wide range of educational AI tools that enable you to create engaging and rich teaching materials including AI tools for generating rubrics, assignments, in-class activities, games, feedback, and many more. Give Almanack a try and share with us your feedback on our social media platforms.
