Aila vs Almanack

Aila is Oak’s free web-based AI lesson assistant for teachers. It creates editable, downloadable lesson packages containing one lesson plan, one slide deck, two quizzes, and one worksheet. Teachers can also request glossaries, tasks, and quizzes for Oak lessons or their own material. Lessons can be adapted by changing content, reading age, geographical context, tasks, and activities. Aila uses retrieval-augmented generation from Oak content written by teachers and checked by subject experts, with emphasis on the English national curriculum. Its FAQ says the system is built to use ChatGPT-4 while Oak evaluates other models. Usage is subject to request limits for lessons and resources, and fair-use limits may apply. Aila is in beta and under active development, so Oak advises checking generated material. It does not currently make images or diagrams, and results are weaker in some subjects, particularly STEM and modern foreign languages. Use requires a laptop or computer with internet access; mobile use is unsupported.

Almanack is a web platform for educators planning curriculum lessons and classroom resources across subjects, grade levels, and languages. Teachers can adjust a lesson’s reading level, topic, content, and pacing while keeping the unit structure intact. It can create below-grade, above-grade, ELL, and IEP versions aligned to the same standards, and generate assessments tied to standards, letter grades, and curriculum units with gradebook-ready artifacts. The free plan costs nothing and includes standards-aligned lesson planning, curriculum design, a lesson and unit planner, slides, basic worksheets and activities, quizzes and assessments, educational games, and custom video recommendations. Almanack lists integrations including Google Classroom, Google Forms, Kahoot, GimKit, Blooket, Wayground, Quizlet, Google Slides, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Word, and PDF. Its Google Classroom integration can import courses, publish lessons as assignments, and display classwork in Almanack course pages. School and district users can sign in through Google, Microsoft Entra ID, Clever, or ClassLink, depending on district configuration.