Free planning tool · The Library · No. 05

The AI tool vetting checklist and register.

Twelve questions a school answers before it approves any AI teacher assistant, and one register that records the answer. Built for the tools your staff are probably already using, Brisk and MagicSchool among them, which both start free and both arrive in the building before anyone bought them. A small school can fill this in inside a week. Every blank is a real answer or an honest “we don’t know yet.”

School Systems Lab · Work through it with the person who owns technology and the person who owns records

1. The paperwork

Four questions that are answered on the vendor’s own pages, if you know where to look. Write down the URL you read and the date you read it. These pages change.

01Is there a signed data privacy agreement, and is it the state’s national agreement or the vendor’s own?Which one: ________ Signed on: ________ Owner: ________

02Who are the sub-processors, and does the published list name the AI model vendors that actually see your teachers’ text?A list that names the hosting company but not the model vendor is incomplete. Ask.

03Does the vendor say, in writing, that teacher and student inputs are never used to train or improve AI models?Where it says so: ________

04How long is student work held after a task finishes, and what happens to everything at the end of the contract?Retention: ________ Deletion at contract end: ________ days

2. The plumbing

How the tool gets into the building, and whether the school controls what’s on inside it.

05Which single sign-on does it support, and does the free tier have any single sign-on at all?If teachers sign up with a personal Google account, the school has no account to close when they leave.

06How is the roster loaded: Clever, ClassLink, a OneRoster file, or a teacher typing names in?Typed names are the route most likely to put a class list somewhere nobody is auditing.

07Can the school turn individual tools off for its staff, or is it all or nothing?On both major products this control sits on the paid school tier, not the free one. Confirm which tier you’re on.

08What is the uptime history, and what does the classroom do when it’s down?Every serious vendor publishes a status page. Read the last ninety days.

3. What it does to a named child

This is the section that decides the register. A tool that drafts a newsletter and a tool that writes a comment about a named student are not the same category of thing, even when they sit in the same menu.

09Which of its tools produce text about a named student: writing feedback, report card comments, IEP or accommodation drafts, behaviour summaries? For each one, which line of our staff boundaries page covers it?If no line covers it, the tool is off until one does.

10Is there a student-facing side? If so, who at our school reads the chats, how fast are flagged conversations surfaced, and can a family see what their child typed?Reader: ________ Alert route: ________

4. The contract, and the person

11Read the terms page aloud. Can the vendor end the licence at will? Is there a refund? Does it claim a licence over what your teachers write into it?Those clauses are common. Knowing they’re there is the point.

12Who at our school answers when it fails?Name: ________ Where to find them: ________

Two worked examples

The two most used AI teacher assistants, with the answers we could read on their own published pages on 2 September 2026. Nothing here is a judgement of either product. Vendors update these pages often, so confirm against the current page before you rely on a line.

Question	Brisk Teaching	MagicSchool AI
01 Privacy agreement	National Data Privacy Agreement signed in 25 states as of Nov 2025; district DPA where no state one exists. Student data addendum updated Aug 2026.	Standard DPA published; National Data Privacy Agreements on the SDPC registry; custom DPA on Enterprise.
02 Sub-processors	Published list names OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, GPTZero and Sapling for AI roles. Does not say which model runs which tool.	FAQ names OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The sub-processor exhibit filed with the SDPC lists hosting and analytics vendors only. Ask for the current list.
03 Training	“Never used to train, fine-tune, or improve AI models.”	Children’s personal information is not used to train AI; zero-data-retention attestations cited from Anthropic and OpenAI.
04 Retention	Underlying student work not stored after a task completes; data returned or destroyed within 30 days of termination.	Deletion or return within 60 days of contract end.
05 Single sign-on	Google and Microsoft on all tiers; Clever and ClassLink for schools.	Google and Microsoft on all tiers; Clever and ClassLink on Enterprise.
06 Rostering	Clever, ClassLink, OneRoster 1.1 and 1.2 files, SFTP.	Clever and ClassLink on Enterprise; Canvas and Schoology through Edlink.
07 Tool switches	Admin dashboard on the paid school tier.	Tool Access controls by school site on Enterprise.
08 Uptime	Status page reports 99.71% for the extension, June to September 2026.	Status page shows a seven-hour degradation on 31 August to 1 September 2026.
09 Named-student outputs	Writing feedback (single, batch, inline comments) and Inspect Writing, which includes AI-text detection the vendor says gives no accuracy score.	IEP generator, accommodation suggestions, report card comments, writing feedback.
10 Student side	Brisk Boost: activities by link or code, no student accounts; teacher sees all chats; concerning content auto-flagged.	MagicStudent rooms by code or link; hourly insights, thread export, severity-tiered alerts. Named student persona retired in February 2026.
11 Terms	No refunds; licence may be terminated “for any or no reason”; perpetual, sublicensable licence over user contributions.	Not read for this table. Read it yourself and write the answer here.
12 Who answers here	________	________

The register

One row per tool. A tool that isn’t on this page isn’t approved, and staff should be able to say that sentence out loud. Review the whole page once a term.

Tool and tier	Approved uses	Never here	Agreement date	Owner	Review date

A boundary, stated plainlyThis checklist structures a school’s review. It is not legal advice, it does not certify any product, and the vendor answers above are what those companies published on the date shown, not an audit of them. Confirm against the current source, then check the result with your qualified counsel before it becomes policy.

From The Library at School Systems Lab. If your team wants the review done with them, tool by tool, that’s the Lab’s responsible AI and EdTech work. Free to use and share within your school. © Leading Bright Scholars, Inc., d/b/a School Systems Lab.

Once the register is filled in

Approving the tool is the easy half.

The boundaries your staff actually remember belong on one page. That is Library No. 03, the staff AI boundaries one-pager. Fill it in after this register, not before, so the never list matches what the approved tools can do.
The reasoning, with the U.S. Department of Education and UNESCO sources, is in Brief No. 01, AI governance begins with a decision.
When a teacher drafts in one of these tools and then needs the plan checked against the standards and the accommodations in the room, that handoff is Library No. 06, the generator-to-plan handoff. On the software side, no AI reads a student record in any ClearPath product, and the data page says so in plain language.

The rest of the shelf is in the free Library.

AI Tool Vetting Checklist and Register