Your Class Is Unique. Your Digital Resources Could Be Too

Your Class Is Unique. Your Digital Resources Could Be Too.

Every class I’ve ever taught has been different, and not in a small way. The students in front of me each year bring their own mix of prior learning, their own interests, their own sense of what’s worth paying attention to. They live in a particular part of the world, with particular things happening around them that a textbook published interstate or overseas was never going to know about. Add in my own interests as a teacher, the examples I gravitate to, the way I like to explain a concept, and no two versions of “teaching energy transformations” or “teaching homeostasis” have ever looked quite the same in my classroom. That’s one of the real joys of this job, being able to shape the learning around the people actually in the room. The harder part is that most of what’s available to support that shaping wasn’t built with those people in mind. A textbook, a digital platform, even a well designed resource for your year group and subject, is built for a generalised student who doesn’t exist. It’s built for the average, and your class isn’t average. It’s unique.

Which raises an obvious question. If anyone is going to design the right resource for your students, who is better placed than you? You know your circumstances better than any publisher or platform ever could. You know your subject, not just the content but where your students tend to get stuck, what misconception shows up every single year, what kind of example actually lands with this particular group. You know exactly what you need a digital resource to do, because you’re the one standing in front of the class when it works and when it doesn’t. The expertise has never been the problem. Teachers have always known what they wanted to build. What’s been missing is a practical way to actually build it.

So why hasn’t this been happening all along? Because until recently, turning that knowledge into something interactive meant learning to code, and finding the time to do it properly. Only a small handful of teachers have ever had both, the skill and the spare hours, so most of us simply didn’t go there. The alternative was getting a school to pay someone else to build it, a developer or an outside platform, but that only made financial sense if the resource could be used broadly enough to justify the cost. The moment something is built to suit lots of classes, it stops being built to suit yours. That’s the trade-off schools have lived with for years, generic and affordable, or specific and out of reach. Generative AI is what’s actually changed that equation. For the first time, the specificity doesn’t have to be sacrificed to make something achievable.

In my own classroom this has shown up in a dozen different forms. Some days it’s a simulation that lets students manipulate a variable no textbook diagram could ever show moving. Other days it’s something as ordinary as an interactive worksheet that gives instant feedback, or a lesson companion that sits alongside what I’m teaching so students have somewhere to check their thinking as we go. I’ve built class dashboards to track shared data over a term, quick explainers when one more way into a concept was needed, vocabulary matching tools and concept based games for the students who learn better through play than through notes. There have been drag and drop labelling activities, built in timers and clocks for a practical lesson, scaffolding guides that walk a student through their own research instead of handing them the answer, reference tools they can keep open while they work.None of these started life as a plan to “build an interactive.” They started as a specific problem in a specific lesson, and whatever came out the other end was simply what that problem actually needed.

None of this means you should build everything yourself, and that’s worth saying plainly. Sometimes a brilliant tool already exists, tested, refined, and built by people who’ve spent years on exactly that problem, and the right move is simply to use it. Sometimes what you actually need is something with a real back end, storing data, managing accounts, syncing across devices, and that calls for proper software, not a single page you built over a coffee break. And sometimes the right answer isn’t digital at all. A whiteboard, a set of cards, a conversation, a worksheet with a pencil, can do the job better than any interactive ever would. None of that is a failure of the AI assisted approach. It’s just good judgement. What’s changed is that building your own is now genuinely one of the options on the table, easily and quickly enough that you can actually weigh it against the others instead of defaulting to whatever’s available because it’s the only thing within reach.

What this actually requires from a teacher is exactly what you’d expect by now. Not coding skill, and not a chunk of professional development time you don’t have. It’s curiosity, and a genuinely clear sense of what you want the activity to do. The AI can write the code. It can’t decide what your students need to practise, or what misconception you’re trying to head off, or what kind of interaction will actually hold their attention for ten minutes on a Tuesday afternoon. That part is still entirely you, and honestly, it’s the part that was always the hard bit anyway. The coding was just the barrier standing in front of it. Once that barrier is gone, what’s left is something most teachers are already good at. Knowing your students, and knowing what would help them.

If any of this sounds like something worth trying in your own classroom, come along to my session, Using AI to Create Digital Interactives for Your Classroom, at the NES – AI in the Classroom Conference on Friday the 4th of September. I’ll walk through the whole process with real examples built for real lessons, so you can see exactly how an idea on a Tuesday morning becomes something your students are clicking through by lunchtime. If you’ve got a problem from your own classroom that’s never quite had the right resource for it, bring it along. We can talk through what it might look like as something interactive.