“This is an exciting and confusing time, and if you haven’t figured out how to make the best use of AI yet, you are not alone. I thought I would use AI tools for the foundation’s strategy reviews this year, which require reading hundreds of pages of briefing materials that an AI could accurately summarise for me. But old habits are hard to break, and I ended up preparing for them the same way I always do”.
Why should teachers use AI summarisers?
Knowledge refresh
As a teacher, you need to move fast. You only have so much time for planning and preparation, and while you know your subjects, everyone needs an occasional refresher on the finer points of complex topics or subjects they haven’t thought about for a while.
An AI summariser will distil your source information into perfect refresher notes, which you can consult during the lesson to ensure you cover everything.
Format Shifting
Many teachers still refer to old university essays or lecture notes. Choose the right AI summariser; it will scan those old written notes, put them into good English, and present them more concisely. They’ll also be more convenient and readily available in a digital format.
Student handouts
The trend of providing further material online for kids to learn from and refer to at home is great for learning, but it is also another task for already busy teachers.
AI summarisers will format your information according to your preferences to ensure it works well on a screen. We recommend instructing your summariser to keep paragraphs short, as these are much easier to read on a phone-sized screen.
Audience adjustment
Following on from the the previous point, what if you need the same information at different levels of detail and complexity? Students’ ages and literacy abilities will determine how complex and information-dense your handouts should be.
Some summarisers let you guide the output to match an audience’s learning ability or maturity.
Repurposing
Like most teachers, you probably hoard lots of bits and pieces of information you think might be helpful in a future lesson. If you teach fact-heavy topics to older learners, this is even more likely.
An AI summariser will take all of this information and combine it into a single clarified document.
Should I use a dedicated summariser or a general AI service like ChatGPT, Claude, or Bard?
Most AI summarisers typically use one of the major AI engines or LLMs. As you can access these directly through an app or website, why would you want a dedicated summariser?
One reason to use a dedicated AI summariser is for simplicity. When you use the LLMs directly, you’ll need to create effective prompts that lead to the desired output. This can take some experimentation, and when your goal is to save time, this is not ideal.
AI summarisers shield you from prompt engineering while still allowing you to direct how your summaries look.
Dedicated summarisers may also contain additional safeguards ensuring the output is accurate and acceptable. You probably know that AI can ‘hallucinate’ or invent facts. Summarisers should prompt the AI in a way that minimises this risk and keeps the information only to what was in your source.
Summarisers make the most sense if that is a task you often have and want to make it as easy as possible. If you have more varied functions in mind, you can consider a multi-function AI tool or directly use the appropriate LLM.
Remember that when you move from a dedicated tool, you will often pay more in cost, which can be wasteful if you don’t use the other features or complexity, as the general-purpose tools do less to support specific tasks.
Which are the best AI summarisers for teachers?
Our teacher reviewers have assessed many apps and websites which employ AI to summarise text. We’ve been impressed by all of them, so your choice will come down to cost, features, and personal preference.
Take a look at our review of the following apps:
Lots of options to guide output. Scan text from an image
Broad toolset includes more than summarising. Choose the most appropriate LLM for your task.
Tools for creating dedicated teaching resources like flashcards. It also works with video.