AI Tool Demo: Differentiating Class Materials With Diffit

Taking the time to differentiate class materials is a valuable step toward making lessons accessible to all students. Learners are different and have different needs—a typical classroom might be made up of students with a wide range of reading levels. In particular, students with individualized education programs or English language learners may require texts at different levels. As important as it is, though, differentiation is a challenge—teachers may struggle to find time to hunt down texts for different learners at the appropriate reading levels.

Luckily, a new artificial intelligence (AI)–powered tool called Diffit may be able to help.

Teachers can copy and paste a passage of text into Diffit, then use the tool to automatically adjust the text to a different reading level—anywhere from “2nd Grade” to “11th Grade+.” Besides raw text, if there is an online article that a teacher wants to modify, they can paste in a link to it directly. Diffit can even accommodate links to YouTube videos; the tool will automatically access and adjust their transcript to produce a piece of leveled text. Alternatively, teachers can produce entirely new pieces of text on any topic using Diffit’s “Literally Anything” feature. This facet of Diffit is an AI text generator that’s quite similar to more popular ones like ChatGPT—except that Diffit even cites the sources for the information that it outputs.

In addition to leveled texts, Diffit automatically creates a list of key vocabulary words from the passages it generates—as well as offering multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions, and open-ended prompts that students can respond to after reading the passage. Diffit even offers teachers some premade, adjustable worksheets—like 3-2-1 reading summaries and graphic organizers—that they can print out and have students fill in. While it’s still important to double-check all outputs of AI for accuracy, the tool allows the task of differentiating class materials to be tackled in an instant, saving teachers valuable time.

To read about other AI tools that can help streamline teachers’ workflow, check out a feature article from Edutopia’s senior editor Andrew Boryga, “6 Productivity Tools Every Teacher Should Know About.” Or, read an article from education technology writer Stephen Noonoo, “4 Time-Saving AI Tools for Teachers.”