A Guide to Free AI Tools for K-20 Educators
by TeachThought Staff
This list highlights free or freemium Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that are particularly useful for educators, students, and researchers in both K–12 and post-secondary contexts. The AI landscape evolves quickly, so the focus here is on the function of the tools—the core tasks they help accomplish.
Tools are grouped by function and include a concise explanation of their primary use. This is not an exhaustive list but offers a representative sample of current, powerful tools that can support teaching, learning, and academic work.
Research & Literature Review
These tools are designed to accelerate and deepen the research process, especially for higher education students and faculty.
Elicit
An AI research assistant. Automates parts of a literature review by finding relevant papers based on a natural language question, summarizing key takeaways, and extracting data from the studies.
Consensus
An evidence-based search engine. It uses AI to find and summarize findings directly from peer-reviewed research to answer user questions.
Scite
Tracks and analyzes how research papers are cited. It shows you not just how many citations a paper has, but whether the citations support, mention, or contest its findings.
SciSpace
An all-in-one platform for academic papers. Its “Copilot” can explain complex text, math (ax2 + bx + c = 0), and tables in simple language. It also offers tools for academic writing and formatting.
Connected Papers & ResearchRabbit
Visual discovery tools. They create interactive graphs to help you explore the academic landscape, find seminal and recent papers, and understand the connections within a research field.
Litmaps
Creates visual maps of literature based on citations and keywords. It helps you build a reading list chronologically and ensures you haven’t missed important papers.
Lesson Planning & Content Creation
These tools assist educators in designing learning experiences, creating instructional materials, and generating ideas.
MagicSchool.ai
A platform built specifically for educators. It offers dozens of tools to help with lesson planning, generating rubrics, writing assessments, creating IEPs, and communicating with parents.
Curipod
An interactive presentation tool. Helps you create engaging, AI-powered lessons with polls, word clouds, Q&As, and student drawing activities.
Gamma
Quickly creates polished presentations, documents, or webpages from a simple text prompt. An excellent tool for both teachers creating lecture materials and students building project presentations.
Canva Magic Studio
A suite of AI tools within the popular Canva design platform. It can generate images, write copy, create presentations from a prompt, and even generate short videos.
NotebookLM
A personal AI assistant grounded in your content. Upload your course readings or lesson plans, and NotebookLM becomes an expert in those specific materials, ready to answer questions and summarize.
Writing & Revision Support
These tools help improve the clarity, precision, and quality of written work for both students and educators.
QuillBot
A multi-function writing tool. It can paraphrase text to improve clarity, check for grammar and plagiarism, and summarize long articles or papers. Excellent for teaching revision skills.
ExplainPaper
A tool for deciphering dense academic writing. Users can upload a paper, highlight confusing text, and receive a simple explanation.
Perplexity
A conversational search engine that provides direct answers to questions with inline citations. It’s a great starting point for research, combining a search engine with a chatbot’s explanatory power.
Conversational AI & General Assistants
These large language models are powerful, multi-purpose tools for brainstorming, planning, explaining complex topics, and drafting text.
ChatGPT
The well-known conversational AI. Excellent for brainstorming lesson ideas, generating examples, creating practice problems, drafting emails, and acting as a thought partner.
Claude
Known for its large context window, meaning it can process and analyze very long documents at once. Useful for summarizing dense material or getting feedback on long-form writing.
Gemini (formerly Bard)
Google’s conversational AI assistant. Its strengths include real-time access to information from the web and deep integration with Google Workspace, allowing it to function as a productivity assistant.
Pi, your personal AI
Designed for more reflective and supportive conversation. It can be used as a sounding board, a tool for practicing conversation, or for social-emotional learning (SEL) prompts.
Student Learning & Study Tools
These tools are designed to be used directly by students to aid their comprehension and review of course material.
Scholarcy
An AI-powered article summarizer. It breaks down long articles or book chapters into manageable, summary-like flashcards, extracts key highlights, and links to open-access versions of cited sources.
TeachAnything
A simple tool that explains any concept in a clear and age-appropriate way. A student can ask “Explain photosynthesis as if I’m in 5th grade” and get a tailored response.