Day Five: Differentiate In Minutes with AI

During coaching sessions, I often hear teachers say,
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“I want to differentiate more, but I just don’t have time to create multiple versions of every activity.”

It’s a common challenge—and completely understandable. Differentiation is powerful, but it’s also time-consuming. Designing leveled texts, creating tiered assignments, and developing scaffolds for struggling learners or enrichment opportunities for advanced students can quickly become overwhelming.

That’s where AI can be a game changer.

Instead of spending hours adapting the same lesson for different groups, AI can help you generate multiple versions in minutes—with built-in supports like sentence stems, visuals, glossaries, and extension tasks. This means you can spend less time creating materials and more time doing what matters most: working directly with your students.

Today’s challenge is all about using AI tools to quickly create leveled content and supports so you can meet the needs of all learners—whether they are early readers building foundational skills, multilingual learners acquiring academic language, or advanced students ready to dive deeper into enrichment tasks.
With just a few clicks, you can begin building the kind of personalized, blended learning environment that gives every student a chance to grow.

Why it Matters

Differentiation isn’t just a teaching best practice—it’s the key to helping every student thrive. But let’s be honest: it takes time. A lot of it.
Teachers often spend hours trying to:

• Rewrite texts at different reading levels
• Add visuals, sentence stems, or glossaries for emerging readers or multilingual learners
• Design extension tasks for advanced students who are ready to go further
• Personalize pacing or product choices to match student readiness

Example of Differentiation in an 8th Grade Classroom at Lamar JR in Lamar CISD.

This level of planning is powerful, but it’s also exhausting—and it’s often the biggest barrier to creating blended or personalized learning studios.
AI can remove that barrier.
With just a few prompts, you can:

• Adapt a text into three reading levels in minutes (Diffit, MagicSchool)
• Generate visual vocabulary sets, sentence stems, and supports (Canva AI, ChatGPT, Gemini)
• Build choice boards, tiered activities, or leveled practice tasks (Curipod, Wayground)

Instead of spending hours prepping materials, you can spend your energy where it matters most: working directly with your students.
This is one of the core strategies in the AI in the Classroom Starter Kit, which helps teachers build sustainable systems for blending instruction and personalizing learning without burning out.

Daily Challenge

Goal: Use AI to create leveled versions of a lesson or activity to meet diverse student needs.
Steps:

1. Choose one upcoming lesson, reading passage, or activity.
2. Use an AI tool (Diffit, MagicSchool, ChatGPT, or Gemini) to create two or more leveled versions of your activity. Add them to your AI Toolkit—more suggested tools are listed in the Day Five download.
3. Post your differentiated activity or a screenshot in the community using #Kish30DayAIChallenge.

💡 Pro Tip: Save your AI-generated versions in a shared folder—you’ll build a ready-to-use library of differentiated resources in no time.

Daily Download

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Bonus AI Prompts to Try

Adapt Text

• “Rewrite this passage on [topic] at three reading levels: emerging, on-level, and enrichment.”
• “Summarize this text in 150 words, 75 words, and 25 words for different reading levels.”

Scaffold Supports

• “Create a vocabulary list with student-friendly definitions and example sentences for [topic].”
• “Generate five sentence stems that students can use to respond to a discussion about [topic].”
• “Provide step-by-step directions for this task written at a 3rd-grade reading level.”

Extend & Enrich

• “Design an extension activity for students who already understand [topic], focusing on application or higher-order thinking.”
• “Create three open-ended questions that encourage critical thinking about [topic].”

ELL / Language Learners

• “Translate these directions into simple English and Spanish. Keep academic meaning but reduce sentence complexity.”
• “Provide a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) activity to reinforce key vocabulary from this text.”