Ask The PhD Community
Empowering 1 Million Educators,
One AI Tool at a Time
One AI Tool at a Time
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Good morning. It is Sunday, which means this edition is different. No breaking news this week; just five tools I genuinely think are worth opening this weekend.
Each one is practical, each has a free tier, and each was built with someone like you in mind. At the bottom is a brief news roundup so you stay current without losing your Sunday to a screen.
One more thing: I spent part of this weekend at a hackathon, building something for this community. More on that soon. But first, the tools.
THIS WEEK'S TOOLS
1. NotebookLM FREE
Research and Course Prep
Upload your syllabus, your readings, your own notes, and up to 50 sources; NotebookLM becomes a private AI that knows only your materials. Ask it to generate study guides, quiz questions, lecture outlines, or a podcast-style audio overview of any document. Nothing leaves your notebook.
Try this Sunday: Upload one dense journal article you have been meaning to read. Ask it: "Summarize the key argument in three sentences, then give me five discussion questions for a graduate seminar."
2. Elicit FREE TIER
Literature Review and Research
Elicit searches across millions of academic papers and extracts structured data from them: study design, sample size, findings, limitations. It does not hallucinate citations; it works from real indexed research. For a literature review that would take a week, Elicit builds the scaffold in an afternoon.
Try this Sunday: Enter a research question you are currently working on. Download the results table and compare it to what you already have. You will almost certainly find something you missed.
3. Coursekit FREE TIER
Student-Facing Course Support
Paste in your course materials and Coursekit builds a custom, branded AI assistant your students can query between class sessions. Instead of a generic chatbot, students get a tool that knows your syllabus, your assignments, and your expectations. Setup is no-code and takes about fifteen minutes.
Try this Sunday: Paste in your most recent syllabus and ask the resulting assistant: "A student emails you at 11 p.m. asking what is due this week. How do you respond?" Test whether it answers the way you would.
4. MagicSchool AI FREE
Grading Feedback and Lesson Design
MagicSchool has over 60 educator-specific tools inside one interface: rubric builders, writing feedback generators, IEP drafting, differentiation suggestions, and a "rephrase for clarity" function that rewrites your assignment prompts at multiple reading levels. It is built for higher ed and K-12 alike, and the free tier covers more than most paid tools.
Try this Sunday: Paste an assignment prompt you wrote this semester into the Writing Feedback tool. Ask it to rewrite the prompt at two levels of clarity, then compare all three versions. You may be surprised by what your students have been reading.
5. ETS Futurenav Adapt AI INSTITUTIONAL
AI Readiness Assessment for Your Department
This one is for when you need data to make a case. Futurenav Adapt AI from ETS assesses how well faculty and staff actually use AI; not how comfortable they say they are, but how they perform on real applied tasks. Departments can use the results to design targeted professional development rather than generic workshops.
Try this Sunday: Forward this entry to your department chair or faculty development director with a single line: "This is how we find out where the gaps actually are."
THIS WEEK IN BRIEF
Agentic AI is on campus now. A tool called Einstein was built to complete entire courses for students end-to-end; The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed covered its implications for academic integrity. The governance question is no longer hypothetical. Read the analysis.
Hiring for your graduates is slowing. Anthropic's peer-reviewed labor study found a 14% drop in new hiring for workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed roles. No mass unemployment yet; the signal is at the entry door. See the full study.
GPT-5.4 can now operate your computer. Computer Use scored 75% on desktop benchmarks versus 72.4% for humans. The academic integrity question shifts from "did a student use AI to write this?" to "did a student use AI to do this?" See the safety card.
Not sure which tools are right for you?
Take the 90-second AI Readiness Assessment and get a personalized profile with the exact tools and first steps built for where you are right now.
No login required. Completely free. No wrong answers.
Try one tool this weekend. Just one. Open it, spend fifteen minutes with it, and notice what happens. That is the practice. That is how this community gets better together.
What did you try this weekend? Hit reply. I read every response.
Dr. Ali Green
Ask The PhD Community | askthephd.com
Published Sunday, March 8, 2026 | Join the community on Substack
Ask The PhD Community is published by Dr. Ali Green | askthephd.substack.com
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