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AI in education
6 September 2024Introducing Aila, our AI-powered lesson assistant

Rachel Strom
Head of School Support
Transform your lesson prep with our free, ground-breaking AI-powered lesson assistant: Aila.
Whether it’s creating bespoke resources or helping you tailor content to your class, Aila can help speed things along — giving you more time to bring your lessons to life.
Through an intuitive step-by-step process, use Aila to help you build a tailor-made lesson plan and resources. All in a matter of minutes.
Okay, just the one lesson to plan today,
and we're done.
Shouldn't take too long.
Write people-friendly keyword definitions.
Decide on explanation key points.
Write some questions to check for understand, design tasks.
Write sentence starters for practise task for Jack.
Write model answers. Make a quiz.
Translate keywords into Spanish.
Create slide deck. Create worksheets.
Plan my delivery.
(gentle music)
How am I gonna get this done?
(computer dings)
Worth a try.
(keyboard keys tapping)
(bright music)
(keyboard keys tapping)
Whether it's creating bespoke resources
or helping you tailor your content to class,
Aila can help you speed things along.
Through an intuitive step-by-step process,
use Aila to build a tailor-made lesson plan and resources
entirely driven by you and adaptable to your class.
From reading age to where you're based,
Aila can help you make bespoke resources effortlessly.
Explore Aila, your AI lesson assistant, today. It is, and always will be, free - so why not take a look around to see what Aila can assist you with.
“Using Aila has been a game-changer, significantly easing my workload and optimising my time. Instead of spending hours searching for and compiling information, I can now prepare comprehensive lessons in a fraction of the time - saving me four hours a week. I'm excited to continue using it and exploring its full potential.”
Ibtisam, Teacher at The Charter School Bermondsey
How to use Aila
Getting started with Aila is easy. By the end of the process, you’ll have created a lesson plan with teaching slides, quizzes, worksheets with practice tasks and more.
Step one
Visit labs.thenational.academy to log in or create an account.
Step two
Tell Aila what you want to plan a lesson on. For example, you could try ‘key stage 3 history - the end of Roman Britain’ or ‘KS2 geography - features of a volcano’.
Step three
You’ll be guided through an intuitive step-by-step process to build your lesson plan and resources. Throughout this, you can ask Aila to adapt them to suit your needs. Aila can add additional case studies, make keywords easier or more challenging, change the context of your lesson, and so much more. Discover 8 things you won’t believe our AI lesson planning tool can do.
Step four
Download the lesson plan and resources in editable formats. After you’ve downloaded them, you can continue to tweak the resources if you wish to, as you plan how you’ll deliver the lesson, with more time to focus here, thanks to Aila.
Want to see Aila in action?
Watch this 3-minute walkthrough by Hannah-Beth, a former science teacher who is part of the team developing the tool.
(soft music)
Hi, I'm Hannah-Beth.
I'm a science teacher and have been a senior leader
in secondary schools for the last 15 years.
I work in the curriculum design team at Oak,
leading on developing the pedagogy of our AI tools,
and I'm really excited to introduce you to Aila,
our new AI lesson assistant.
Aila has been designed
to lighten the load of lesson planning
and resource creation, whilst keeping you
as the teacher and the expert in the driving seat.
As the content Aila draws on is based on Oak's pedagogy
and often from our existing resources,
which have been developed by subject experts,
it's safe, accurate, and national curriculum aligned.
So what exactly is it that Aila can help you to do?
I'll quickly show you an example of how to plan a lesson
and create downloadable resources with is Aila.
A reminder, that it's you that will bring
the lesson to life.
Aila just does some of the legwork for you.
Simply start off by telling Aila the lesson
that you'd like to plan,
which year group or key stage's for,
and Aila will set to work,
searching for the best available content to use
as a foundation for your lesson.
Let's go for inventions of the industrial revolution.
Just like you would, Aila starts
with identifying the learning outcome
and generating learning cycles.
You'll get suggestions for the prior knowledge
that pupils need to have before the lesson,
key learning points, misconceptions,
and keywords with their pupil-friendly definitions.
Think your pupils might struggle with the challenge
of your keyword definitions.
Just ask Aila to lower the literacy levels.
Want to introduce local context?
Just let Aila know where you are based
and your lesson will be adapted to your location.
Once you are happy, Aila will get to work on helping you
to create your starter quiz for testing prior knowledge,
and then build your learning cycles.
All of this can be edited to suit your pupil's needs.
Aila will help you to create all of the content
for your lesson, including suggestions
for your explanations and practise tasks.
You could then ask Aila to write
success criteria or model answers.
You'll get an exit quiz two,
and you can ask Aila to make any additional
materials that you might need.
Be as specific as possible in your instructions to Aila,
and you'll be able to create a lesson
that really suits the needs of your pupils.
Once you've finished creating your lesson,
you'll be able to download the lesson resources
that you've created together.
This includes a lesson plan, slides a worksheet with all
of your practise tasks, the starter and exit quiz,
and any additional materials that you've made.
All of these resources are downloadable and editable,
which means you can adapt them
before either projecting them or printing them.
Take back that time that you'd have otherwise spent
trolling the internet for resources
or building them for scratch,
and focus on how you want to bring the lessons to life,
using your expertise and knowledge
of your pupils to accelerate learning.
Aila is a powerful tool, but it isn't perfect yet.
It's in beta, which means we're still testing,
learning, and improving the way it works.
We also know it doesn't yet have all the features
that you might want.
As it's using generative AI,
it's of getting things wrong,
although we've worked really hard to minimise this.
You'll need to check all of your resources
really carefully before using them.
To access Aila, simply head to our website,
click on AI experiments,
Plus, there's more help to get started with Aila in this help article.
“Incorporating Alia into my teaching toolkit has the potential to not only save me time - around 30 minutes per lesson - but also enhance the quality and effectiveness of my lessons, ultimately benefiting both myself and my students.”
James, Teacher at St Cuthbert Mayne School
What makes Aila different?
Many teachers feel unsure about the reliability of AI tools, and whether they’re safe to use. That’s why we’ve worked with expert AI developers and education specialists to create a tool that’s purpose-built for teachers. It makes the process of planning and resourcing lessons more efficient without sacrificing quality.
So what makes it different to all the other AI tools for teachers out there?
You’re in control
As a teacher, you are the expert. Only you know your context and the pupils in your classroom.
Many AI-powered lesson planning tools ask you to input a little information at the start and then plan your lesson for you. With Aila, you’re in the driving seat throughout. We’ve designed it to pause intentionally during the lesson planning process and you can ask Aila to change and tweak the content to suit your needs.
Aila is underpinned by a strong pedagogical foundation
Aila draws on our curriculum plans and teaching resources which have been developed in line with our research-informed curriculum principles created by leading educators and subject experts. This means that content is aligned with the national curriculum and geared to UK classrooms.
Alongside the AI techniques we have used to build Aila, this base of human-created curriculum materials significantly improves the quality of resources you can produce using Aila.
You can trust what Aila creates
We’ve built quality checks into Aila that evaluate the lessons and resources produced against our curriculum principles. Checks for grammar, Americanisms and coherence mean you can feel confident in the quality of the resources you share in your classroom. Learn more about how we’ve worked on ensuring pedagogical integrity.
With AI-driven tools, such as Aila, you need to make sure that what you create for your classroom is safe for your pupils. Learn more about the protections we have put in place to ensure safe lesson creation.
Aila supports the wider education market
Aila is just one of the many ways in which products can be built off our content.
The code and prompts that underpin Aila’s accessible user experience, as well as the quality-assured curriculum plans and teaching resources that inform its outputs, are openly licensed.
This means that anyone can use our work as a basis to innovate further and create safe new AI tools and teaching products.
“Using AI to support my planning and teaching wasn’t something I’d really considered until I came across Aila. To say I was blown away would be an understatement!”
Avril, Deputy Headteacher at Bedford Drive Primary School
What’s next for Aila?
Aila is still in the beta phase, which means we’re still actively testing and developing the tool. By getting teachers to use Aila in real-life conditions, we can more easily identify issues and opportunities to improve it.
A huge thank you to the thousands of teachers who have already used Aila to plan many thousands of lessons and given us their feedback.
We’ll continue to iterate it over time in response to further feedback we receive. So why not give Aila a go and let us know what you think.
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