MAKING IT EASIER TO BE A BETTER TEACHER

NOTEWORTHY NEWS

Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to dive deeper:

• Everyone was wrong (except for us teachers) - screens actually are destroying our classrooms.

• Here are some research-backed and creative ways to get kids to fall in love with reading again.

• These kids absolutely destroyed AI in this puzzle challenge.

TECH TOOL

Your Teaching Files Are a Mess

Let’s be honest, your teaching resources folder is a war zone. 

You’ve got PDFs from past PDs, Word docs from a colleague, scanned IEPs, curriculum standards from three different years, and an unlabeled folder called “ThisYearFinal_Maybe2.”

It’s chaos. And even worse: you know there’s something useful in there... if only you could find it.

The Solution: CoralAI

CoralAI is a document-powered AI workspace designed for people who live in PDFs, slide decks, lesson plans, student files, and more. 

Teachers can upload any file - over 20 formats are supported including scanned docs and media - and CoralAI builds a searchable, taggable knowledge base that you can interact with like a colleague using any of your favorite built-in AI models.

CoralAI seamlessly turns your documents, audio, and video, into dynamic, searchable tools. It summarizes documents instantly, groups related files (like IEPs or assessments), and even lets you chat with entire groups of documents at once to get answers with clickable citations. 

In Your Classroom:

Let’s be honest - edtech has been really AI focused lately. And as cool as it’s been, there’s just too many tools to download (and purchase) and actually use.

CoralAI may replace a majority of them in your prep toolbelt as you gear up for the new school year. 

Here’s how you can start using it:

Strategies

• Organize Your Chaos: Upload your existing mess of teaching documents and use tags like “Semester 1,” or “Science Unit,” to make a smart database instead of a messy desktop.

• Catch Up Without Reading It All: Summarize long PDFs, parent resources, or school policy docs in seconds. If you're onboarding at a new school, CoralAI becomes your shortcut to catching up.

• Prep Smarter, Not Slower: Upload your old lessons, past assessments, and board standards. Ask CoralAI to compare them, suggest updates, or build a mind map from your files. You’ll save time and spot gaps you may have missed.

CoralAI isn’t just another AI that spits out generic text. It’s a workflow tool built for educators who already have the materials - they just can’t keep track of them all. 

There’s a free plan available, but its time-saving power is really shown in their premium plan which runs as low as $14 USD/month.

Whether you're reorganizing during summer, catching up in September, or managing chaos mid-semester, CoralAI gives you the brainpower of a second teacher assistant who knows your filing system better than you do.

BRAINY BITS

Is AI changing how we speak?

You may have noticed friends or teachers using words like “delve” or “meticulous” more often - and it’s not just a coincidence. 

A new study published this month found that after ChatGPT hit the scene in late 2022, words it likes to add when fixing up text started appearing more in everyday speech, from YouTube talks to podcast conversations.

The Study: ChatGPT’s Influence on how we Speak

German researchers analyzed 740,000+ hours of YouTube academic talks and 770,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch . 

They first had ChatGPT “polish” human‑written text, noting which words it added most - think delve, meticulous, boast, swift, etc. 

Then, using econometric causal‑inference methods, they tracked those “GPT words” over time, comparing them to weighted blends of human synonyms.

The Results:

Just months after ChatGPT’s debut, GPT words surged - growing 25–50% per year - in academic talks and in spontaneous podcast chats. 

Even unscripted podcast banter adopted terms significantly more often than controls, especially in science, tech, and education shows. 

The pattern couldn’t be chalked up to other trends: synthetic‑control tests pin the jump squarely to ChatGPT’s release (at least according to this study).

In Your Classroom:

Teachers know that language shapes thought - and now AI is mix­ing its own flavor into our everyday speech. 

What can you do?:

Strategies

• Model Awareness: Point out new words when they crop up. (“Notice how someone said delve instead of explore?”).

• Encourage Variety: Challenge students to swap in synonyms. A simple “find three alternatives” exercise keeps their vocabularies rich and resists AI’s gentle homogenization.

• Cultivate Voice: Remind kids - and yourself - that authenticity matters. Talk about tone and register: when does meticulous suit better than careful?

In a world where AI co‑writes emails and chats, our own words become malleable clay. 

By shining a light on these subtle shifts, we can help students - and ourselves - retain linguistic diversity and keep our voices genuinely human.

REFERENCES

This week’s issue adapts information from the following sources:

Tech Talk:

Pearl Labs (2025). The AI Assistant for Your Documents.  Retrieved from https://www.getcoralai.com/?ref=thepenweekly
Note: The PEN Weekly may receive an affiliate bonus for using the above referral link. This has in no way impacted our review of the edtech; Pearl Labs has had no input, approval, or review of this week’s Tech Tool. All opinions expressed are our own.

Brainy Bits:

Yakura, Hiromu, et al. (2025). ‘Empirical Evidence of Large Language Model’s Influence on Human Spoken Communication’. arXiv [Cs.CY], http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754. arXiv.