Kosher AI for teachers - a practical guide for mechanchim

Kosher AI for teachers is mostly about time. A mechanech who spends Motzei Shabbos rewriting one worksheet for three reading levels, then drafting a letter home, then writing thirty report-card comments, has a lot to gain from a tool that does the first draft. The question in a yeshiva or day school is whether that tool holds to the school's standard, and which parts of the job should never be handed over.

This is a practical guide for rebbeim and teachers, limudei kodesh and limudei chol, using Navōn. For a broader look at which teaching tasks AI does well and badly, see AI for teachers: what it is actually good for.

Lesson plans

Give it the topic, the grade, the length of the period and anything particular about the class. "A 40-minute lesson on the water cycle for fifth grade, mixed ability, two talmidim working well below grade level" comes back far more usable than "a lesson on the water cycle". Ask for an opening, a main activity and a way to close, then rewrite it in your own voice. The structure is the useful part. Whether the activity will hold this particular class after lunch is still your call.

For limudei kodesh, use it for the shape of the lesson, not the content. It can suggest how to open a sugya with a question, or how to divide a perek into parts for chavrusa work. It cannot be trusted to quote a posuk, a Rashi or a Gemara accurately, and it will sometimes give a confident reference to a source that does not exist. Every source on the page should come from your own sefer.

Worksheets

The Print tool lays its answer out as a finished page, with headings, numbered questions and answer lines, and no commentary around it to delete. Say how many questions, of what kind, and ask for an answer key: "Twelve questions on chapter four, eight recall and four that ask why, with an answer key."

The strongest version works from your own material. Paste in the text the class actually read and ask for questions on that. Questions generated from a topic drift toward whatever is most written about it, which may not be what you taught.

Differentiated reading levels

This is the use that saves the most time for the least risk. Paste in a passage you have already checked and ask for two more versions: one two grade levels lower with shorter sentences, and one with the harder words glossed in brackets. The content was yours and correct to begin with, the tool is only reshaping it, and you can see within a minute whether it worked.

The same approach helps a talmid who is new to English, or a class where some children read Hebrew more comfortably than others. Ask for exactly the version you need, and say who it is for.

Parent letters

The Docs tool is built for letters and routine writing. Give it the facts, the date, what parents need to do and by when, and ask for something short and warm. A letter about a trip, a schedule change or a class siyum takes a minute to draft and two to correct.

Read every letter as the parent who will receive it. A model's default tone can be stiff or oddly cheerful, and it does not know which families in your class are going through something. Anything sensitive, a concern about a child or a disciplinary matter, should be written by you, and is usually better said on the phone first.

Report-card comments

Used well, this helps with the part of report cards that is genuinely mechanical: turning your notes into sentences. Write your own observations in shorthand, "strong in chumash, reads fluently, rushes written work, kind to the younger boys", and ask for a two-sentence comment that is warm and specific. Then edit it until it sounds like you.

Two rules. The judgement is yours: the tool does not know the child, and a comment you could not explain at a parent meeting should not go home. And keep identifying detail out of the prompt. A first name or initials is enough, and nothing about a diagnosis, a family situation, or anything you would not put on paper. What you type is sent to a model to be answered, and it is kept in your account's record of the conversation.

What to keep human

• Psak and hashkafa. A model will produce a fluent answer to a halachic question, but it cannot pasken. A talmid's sheilah goes to a rav.
• Grades. A grade you cannot explain is one you should not give.
• Knowing the talmid: who is struggling at home, who needs to be called on, and who needs to be left alone this week.
• Anything sensitive that goes to a parent.
• The Torah itself. Your sources come from the sefer, and your explanation comes from you.

How a kosher AI for teachers keeps the school's standards with the students

A worry menahelim often raise is that a filtered tool in school does nothing once a talmid goes home. In Navōn the school's settings belong to the student's account, not to a school computer. The blocked topics, the strictness level and the hours a school sets are checked on Navōn's servers on every request, so they apply wherever the student signs in, including on a phone at home.

A school can apply its settings to everyone, or target them by class, grade or age. If a parent has also set controls, the two are combined and the stricter wins on each point. A parent cannot switch off what the school has blocked.

Teachers' own accounts are held to the platform's rules too, and the material you make goes through the same checks as everything else. A picture for a class poster is drawn with modest dress by default and checked before you see it. That matters more than it sounds: a worksheet a talmid takes home carries the school's name, and it should not be the one thing in the building nobody checked.

None of this is a fence around the whole problem. A student using a different tool in another tab is outside any school's settings. What a school can do is make the tool it provides one that holds to its standard, and give teachers good reason to use that one.