For a PE teacher, AI is worth using on everything that happens on paper before and after the lesson, and it is close to useless once the class is moving. Eight tools cover the paper side well: ConnectedPE for the unit plan, MagicSchool for the rest of the school's paperwork, Brisk Teaching for written work and for watching your own teaching back, Snorkl for the explanation a student can give out loud but not on a worksheet, Diffit for health and theory reading, Canva for Education for station cards you can laminate, StaffDraft for the injury email, and ChatGPT for everything left over.
Only one of those was built for physical education. The other seven are general teacher tools that happen to do a PE job well, and knowing which is which saves you an hour of trials.
Here is the number behind that. The aieducator.tools directory lists 138 AI tools for education. Twenty-three of them tag Physical Education as a subject they serve. Exactly one of those twenty-three mentions PE, sport or fitness anywhere in its own product description. The tag is a checkbox on a signup form, not a feature, and a PE teacher who filters by subject and trusts the result will waste an afternoon. That count was taken from the directory's public API on September 19, 2026.
What each tool does, and what it costs
| Tool | The job it does | Price, checked September 19, 2026 | Student data | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ConnectedPE | Builds the PE unit, the progression and the skill cue cards | Free account with 13 AI tools; paid plan price not published | Vendor publishes no student data statement | The unit you have to write from scratch |
| MagicSchool | Writes the school paperwork that is not PE | Free $0 with 80+ tools; Plus $12.99 a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually | Custom data privacy agreement on the Enterprise plan only | The teacher who also runs a homeroom |
| Brisk Teaching | Gives rubric feedback on written work inside Google Docs | Free browser extension with 20+ tools; school pricing on request | Vendor states it stores your prompts, not the student work behind them | Health and sport science written work |
| Snorkl | Takes a spoken and drawn student explanation and responds to it | Free teacher plan, activities capped; school plan on request | Vendor states secure student sign-in, COPPA and FERPA approved | The student who can do it but cannot write it |
| Diffit | Rewrites a health or theory reading at the level a class can read | Free Basic, your content accessible for 90 days; school plan priced by enrollment | Vendor publishes no student data statement on its pricing page | The theory lesson on a wet Friday |
| Canva for Education | Turns a list of teaching points into a printable station card | Free for verified K-12 teachers | Vendor requires teacher verification, not student accounts, to start | Anything that has to survive a wet gym floor |
| StaffDraft | Turns three lines of notes into the message home | Free for 10 drafts a month; £6 a month individual; £5 per user a month, minimum 20 users | Vendor states drafts are not retained after processing; directory record lists no student data collected | The injury note you write in the parking lot |
| ChatGPT | Answers the odd question none of the above covers | Free through June 2028 for verified US K-12 educators | OpenAI states teacher inputs are not used to train its models by default | Everything left over |
Which one should a PE teacher open first?
Four questions settle it, and you can run them on anything a colleague recommends in the equipment room.
Does the job happen on paper or on the court? AI writes, rewrites and formats. It does not watch a child throw. A tool that promises to grade a movement skill from video is making a much larger claim than a tool that promises to write a rubric, and it should be held to a much higher standard of evidence. Start with the paper jobs, where the tools already work.
Does a student's name or face go into it? If it does, the tool is an instructional tool with a data footprint, and in a growing number of states that now triggers paperwork before you can use it. If it does not, you are drafting, and drafting is low risk.
Can you check the output in under a minute? A lesson plan you can read in forty seconds is worth generating. A term's worth of progress comments you would have to verify one by one is not a saving, it is a transfer of work from writing to checking.
Is PE the subject, or the checkbox? Ask the vendor's own site, not a directory filter, whether it has ever seen a gym. ConnectedPE names the jobs: adapted PE, game modifier, skill cue cards. A general platform will give you "physical education" in a dropdown and a lesson plan about the circulatory system.
ConnectedPE is the best fit for the unit plan, because it is the only tool here built for PE
ConnectedPE describes itself as "the PE platform built by teachers since 2012," and its free AI tools page lists thirteen generators aimed squarely at the subject: Unit Planner, Lesson Planner, Progression Builder, Rubric Maker, Worksheet Maker, Resource Builder, Report Writer, PE Games, Game Modifier, Adapted PE, Differentiation, Skill Cue Cards and a question box called Ask ConnectedPE (tools page). Game Modifier and Adapted PE are the two that do not exist anywhere else in this list. Both answer the question a PE teacher actually asks, which is how to keep thirty children moving when four of them cannot do the activity as written.
Watch out for: ConnectedPE is not listed in the aieducator.tools directory, so there is no independent security assessment, rating or review count on it here. Its own site does not say how many generations a free account gets.
Pricing: A free account with thirteen AI tools (tools page). The paid plan has no public price, checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: ConnectedPE publishes no student data statement we could verify in this run. The tools generate teacher-facing planning documents rather than student-facing content, so the ordinary practice applies: keep student names out of the prompt, and ask the vendor directly about data handling before your district approves it.
MagicSchool is the best fit for the school paperwork that is not PE, because its free plan is the broadest here
Most PE teachers carry a second job: homeroom, an advisory group, a club, a duty rota, sometimes a health course. MagicSchool's free plan is $0 with more than 80 teacher tools, the Raina chatbot, quiz generation and class writing feedback (pricing). It holds a 4.74 rating from 19 reviews in our directory, the second-highest review count in this list. Nothing in it is PE-specific, which is the point: use ConnectedPE for the unit and MagicSchool for everything the school asks of you in the same week.
Watch out for: the free plan caps generations. Unlimited output, the 50+ student tools and MagicSchool Labs all sit behind Plus.
Pricing: Free $0 forever; Plus $12.99 a month billed monthly, or $8.33 a month billed annually; Enterprise custom-quoted (pricing), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: MagicSchool states that a custom data privacy agreement, single sign-on and district tool controls come with the Enterprise plan, not with Free or Plus (pricing). Its pricing page states no minimum age. A teacher on the free plan is using a consumer account, so keep student names out of it and let your district negotiate the agreement before any student logs in.
Brisk Teaching is the best fit for written work and for watching your own teaching back, because a PE teacher education study documented exactly that use
GCSE PE, AP sport science and high school health all produce writing, and Brisk gives rubric-aligned feedback on it inside the Google Doc where the student wrote it, through a free browser extension with more than 20 tools (FAQ). It is the most reviewed tool in this list, 4.77 from 35 reviews in our directory.
The second use is the interesting one. Nikki Hollett of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Sheri J. Brock of Auburn University published "AI-Enhanced Feedback Loops in Physical Education Teacher Education" in Educational Practices in Kinesiology on May 8, 2026, describing a model in which trainee PE teachers filmed themselves teaching, ran the video through analysis tools and custom chatbots alongside Brisk, then taught the lesson again. They report the teach-reflect-revise cycle compressing "within weeks rather than months," with measurable improvement in clarity, pacing, demonstration and student engagement between the first and second attempts, across cohorts of 10 to 40 candidates (full text). That is a teacher-education study rather than a K-12 one, and the participants were being graded on their teaching, which is a strong motivator. Our view is that it is still the best-evidenced AI use in PE published this year, and the method transfers: film one lesson, get structured feedback on your own instruction, teach it again.
Watch out for: Brisk works inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. If your students hand in work on paper, which in PE they often do, Brisk has nothing to read.
Pricing: Free browser extension with 20+ tools, plus 14 days of premium access on signup that then reverts to free; the Schools and Districts plan is quoted on request (FAQ), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: Brisk states it is FERPA and COPPA compliant and SOC 2 compliant as of October 2025, and that it stores your inputs and Brisk's outputs but not the underlying student work it processes (FAQ). Note the consequence the vendor spells out: type a student's name into a prompt and the name is stored. Our directory record for Brisk carries no hosting location, minimum age or compliance data, so confirm those with your district.
Snorkl is the best fit for the student who can do it but cannot write it, because it grades a spoken explanation
PE is full of students whose understanding is real and whose writing is not. Snorkl has them record a voice explanation alongside a whiteboard drawing and returns instant AI feedback on the reasoning (Snorkl). Ask for a thirty-second answer to "why does the follow-through matter on an overhand serve," with an arrow drawn on the whiteboard, and you have evidence of understanding from a child who would have written four words. It holds 4.75 from 12 reviews in our directory.
Watch out for: Snorkl lists math, science, ELA, history and languages as its subjects, and PE is not among them. Nothing stops you using it for PE, but the prompt library will not help you and you are writing every activity yourself.
Pricing: Free teacher plan with unlimited classes, co-teachers, AI feedback and library access, with the number of activities capped; the school and district Premium plan is quoted on request (plans), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: Snorkl states secure student sign-in and that it is "COPPA and FERPA approved," and offers a data privacy agreement and single sign-on on the free teacher plan (Snorkl). This is the one tool in the list where children log in and record their own voices, so it is the one your district has to approve rather than the one you try on Monday. Our directory record has no hosting location or minimum age for it.
Diffit is the best fit for the theory lesson, because it rewrites a reading at the level the class can read
Rain closes the field and thirty children are in a classroom with an article about concussion protocol written for adults. Diffit takes that text, or a topic, and produces it at several reading levels with questions attached (pricing). Its directory rating is 4.20 from 5 reviews, the lowest in this list, and it is still the fastest route from a source text to something a mixed class can all read.
Watch out for: the free plan only keeps your content accessible for 90 days, so a unit you build in September is gone by the time you teach it again.
Pricing: Basic is free, with content made in the last 90 days accessible; Diffit for Schools is a flat-rate annual subscription tiered by student enrollment, with no figure published on the pricing page; an individual teacher subscription exists with no price shown (pricing), checked September 19, 2026. Treat the school and individual prices as unverified.
Safety: Diffit publishes no student data statement on its pricing page and our directory record has no hosting, age or compliance data. Used the ordinary way, you paste in a text and print the output, and no student data is involved at all.
Canva for Education is the best fit for station cards, because the output survives a wet gym floor
A PE teacher's documents get rained on, stood on and blown across a field. Canva turns a list of teaching points into a printable, laminatable card with the diagrams and the icons already placed, and it is free for verified K-12 teachers (eligibility guidelines). At 4.62 from 39 reviews it is the most reviewed tool in our whole directory for this kind of work.
Watch out for: the verification rules are narrow. Canva excludes higher education staff, tutors, parents, and homeschool educators who are not employed by a K-12 school, and it re-verifies credentials every three years.
Pricing: Free for certified K-12 teachers at accredited schools, plus school librarians, learning support staff and curriculum specialists; a verified school email grants instant access and anyone else uploads a document for review within 48 hours (eligibility guidelines), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: The free program verifies the teacher, and nothing obliges you to create student accounts to use it for station cards. Our directory record carries no hosting location or compliance data for Canva, so check with your district before student logins are involved.
StaffDraft is the best fit for the message home, because it is the only tool here that collects no student data at all
Sprained ankle in period three, and the parent needs an email before the bus. StaffDraft turns rough notes into the message, with personal identifier detection and safeguarding language checks built in (StaffDraft). Our directory record lists its data hosting as the United Kingdom, GDPR compliant, no student data collected, minimum age 18 and over. For a tool you will use in a hurry, on a day something went wrong, that record is the reason to pick it over a general chatbot.
Watch out for: it is British-priced and British-hosted, so a US district may prefer a vendor inside its own jurisdiction. Ten free drafts a month is roughly one a week.
Pricing: Free for 10 drafts a month; £6 a month for an individual with unlimited drafts; £5 per user a month for a whole organization with a minimum of 20 users; pay-as-you-go credits from £2.99 for 20 drafts (StaffDraft), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: StaffDraft states that drafts are not retained after processing and advises removing sensitive data before generating (StaffDraft). Its directory record lists a minimum age of 18 and over, which means it is a staff tool and no child should ever be in it.
ChatGPT is the best fit for everything left over, because it is free for US teachers until 2028
Rules for a game you half remember, a warm-up for a class of nine, a script for the conversation with a parent about kit. OpenAI states that ChatGPT for Teachers is free through June 2028 for verified US K-12 teachers, staff, administrators and district leaders at accredited schools, and that inputs are not used to train its models by default (help center).
Watch out for: OpenAI states the plan is not currently available for students. It is a teacher workspace, and treating it as a student tool puts you outside what the vendor supports.
Pricing: Free through June 2028 for eligible US K-12 educators (help center), checked September 19, 2026.
Safety: OpenAI states teacher inputs are not used to train its models by default, and that automated systems may still review content for safety. No students, so no student data, provided you keep names out of the prompt.
What about the tools everyone asks about?
Khanmigo is free for teachers and $4 a month for parents and learners, with district pricing on request (pricing), but its content is built around Khan Academy's academic subjects, so there is little in it for a PE department.
Gemini Notebook, which Google renamed from NotebookLM, answers questions only from documents you upload. Point it at your state standards and your department handbook and it becomes useful for policy questions, not for planning activity.
Quizlet still does what it always did for health and sport science vocabulary, and nothing for movement.
What this looks like in one unit
Seventh grade volleyball, lesson three of six, the underhand serve. Thirty-two students, one gym, four with individual education programs, two on crutches.
Before the lesson, ConnectedPE's Progression Builder gives you the four-step breakdown from toss to contact, and Game Modifier turns the six-a-side game into something the two students on crutches can score and referee rather than sit out. Adapted PE handles the four IEPs as a group rather than making you write four versions by hand. Canva turns the four teaching points into a station card you print twice and tape to the wall.
During the lesson, nothing. No tool. You watch thirty-two serves and you say the useful thing.
After it, Snorkl collects a thirty-second spoken answer from each student on why the toss matters, which takes you four minutes to skim and tells you more than an exit ticket would. One student lands awkwardly, so StaffDraft turns your two-line note into the email home before you leave the building. On Saturday, if you want to, you film lesson four and run Brisk over your own instruction the way the Hollett and Brock study describes, and you find out that your demonstration is fine and your pacing is not.
Total AI time, maybe twenty-five minutes. None of it during the part that matters.
What Florida's new rules change for PE
On September 16, 2026, the Florida State Board of Education adopted statewide rules on AI and educational technology covering K-12 districts, charter schools and the Florida College System (Florida Department of Education). Four of its provisions land directly on the list above.
Districts must notify parents when an AI instructional tool is approved, naming the tool and the courses it will be used in, and must give parents the choice to opt their child in or take a non-AI alternative. For PE that means a tool like Snorkl, where students log in and record, needs the district's approval process and a parent letter naming your course. A tool like StaffDraft or ConnectedPE, which you use to write your own documents, does not put a child in front of AI at all.
The rules prohibit AI designed to meet a student's social or emotional needs or simulate companionship, and they prohibit undisclosed behavior monitoring, social scoring and psychological profiling. Any product pitched at PE departments on the promise of tracking effort, engagement or attitude from video is walking into that second clause.
They also bar vendors from selling student data or using it to train agentic models, which is the question to put to a vendor whose privacy page is vague. Florida is one state, and its rules do not bind a district in Ohio. The direction is the point: the bar for putting a child in front of an AI tool is rising, and the bar for using one to write your own unit plan is not moving at all. Our other posts on FERPA and student data and on the behavior paperwork side of the same question go further into that split.
Three jobs to keep off AI in PE
Judging a movement skill. No tool in this list watches a child move, and the ones elsewhere that claim to are making a claim about biomechanics from a phone camera in a noisy gym. Grade the serve yourself.
Deciding who is safe to participate. Return-to-play after a head knock, a student's asthma on a cold morning, whether a child with a new diagnosis joins contact work. These are judgments with a duty of care attached, and they belong to you, the school nurse and the family.
Assessing effort or attitude. This is the one the technology is most eager to offer and least able to do, and it is now explicitly prohibited in Florida's new rules where it happens without disclosure. A child having a bad week looks identical to a child who is not trying, and only a person who knows them can tell the difference.
Wang and Wang's review of AI in physical education, published in Frontiers in Public Health on November 8, 2024, reports that many PE teachers lack basic knowledge and skills in AI technology, feel psychological pressure adopting it, and receive nothing on it through conventional teacher training (full text). That gap is real, and it is also an argument for starting where the tools are boring and reliable rather than where they are exciting and unproven.
Where this leaves you
Open ConnectedPE, generate one unit you have to write anyway, and see whether the progression it gives you is better or worse than the one in your head. That takes fifteen minutes and it answers the only question that matters, which is whether a tool built for your subject beats a tool built for everyone else's. If you want the wider field first, the lesson planning and resource creation category in the directory carries 41 tools with their pricing and data handling side by side, and our guides to free tools and tools for special education cover the adapted PE side in more depth.
The gym is the last place in a school where the work is visibly, physically human. Keep it that way, and let the software have the filing.
Dan Fitzpatrick is The AI Educator. Read more from him at aieducator.tools.
