Last updated September 17, 2026.
Six tools are worth your time this report season, and they do not do the same job. MagicSchool is the one to standardize on if your whole staff needs the same platform. TeacherMatic is the specialist for a teacher who writes a lot of comments and wants tight control of tone. Brisk Teaching works inside the Google Doc where the student's work already sits. Gemini Notebook refuses to invent, because it only answers from sources you upload. Diffit fixes the comment a family cannot read. ChatGPT is the free fallback almost everyone already has open, and it carries the setting most teachers have never touched.
The choice turns on one thing, and it is not the quality of the prose. Every one of these tools writes a serviceable report card comment. What separates them is what happens to the sentence you paste in, the one containing a named child's reading level and a note about their anxiety in class. That is the question this article answers first.
Which AI report writing tool should I use?
Prices and free tiers below were checked against each vendor's own page on September 17, 2026.
| Tool | Best for | Free tier | Where your text goes | Editing still needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MagicSchool | A whole staff on one platform | $0 forever, 80+ teacher tools (pricing) | Vendor states it does not use personal information to train models (privacy policy) | Moderate: strong structure, generic warmth |
| TeacherMatic | High-volume comment writing with tone control | £0.00, 15 generations a day for one week then 5 a day (pricing) | Vendor states Workspace data is not used for AI or ML training; LLM services hosted on Azure in Switzerland (privacy notice) | Light: tone settings do most of the work |
| Brisk Teaching | Drafting where the student work already lives | $0, unlimited usage, all feedback tools (plans) | Custom data agreements sit in the paid school tier, not the free one (plans) | Light, if your evidence is already in the doc |
| Gemini Notebook | Reports that must stay tied to evidence | Freemium; no public figure for paid tiers | Vendor states content is not used to directly train its foundational models unless you give feedback (privacy note) | Light: it will not invent what you did not upload |
| Diffit | Rewriting a finished comment for the family | Free individual account; no public price for school plans (pricing) | Vendor's school and district terms are quote-based; check before uploading names | Light: it is a leveling pass, not a draft |
| ChatGPT | A free general draft when nothing else is approved | $0; paid consumer tiers exist, figures not shown on the pricing page when checked | Consumer accounts are used for training by default until you turn it off (data use) | Heavy: it will happily invent a child |
What changed this fall, and why it matters for report cards
Report writing became a policy question in September, not just a workload one. New York City placed a one-year moratorium on generative AI for students from 2-K through eighth grade, covering nearly 600,000 students, about two thirds of the system. The same announcement was explicit about staff: "Teachers will continue to be permitted to use AI for instructional planning and operational tasks, provided all tools comply with NYCPS safety standards" (Mayor's Office, September 2, 2026).
Read that second sentence carefully, because report writing sits exactly on its edge. Writing a report card comment is an operational task. It is also the one operational task that requires you to type a named child's data into a text box. So the permission you have is real, and the condition attached to it does the work: the tool has to clear your district's standards, and you are the one putting the data in.
That is a different question from "which tool writes the nicest sentences," and it is why the table above leads with where your text goes rather than with features.
Why the directory cannot answer the privacy question for you
Here is something worth knowing before you trust any list, including this one.
The aieducator.tools directory holds 125 tools. Twenty-seven of them describe reporting or report-writing features in their own listings. Of those 27, exactly 18 state all three of the things a teacher needs to know before pasting in student evidence: where the data is hosted, the vendor's FERPA position, and a minimum user age.
Every one of those 18 has zero user reviews.
The nine report-related tools that teachers have actually used and rated, TeacherMatic, Snorkl, Toddle, Teachmate, Perplexity, Arbor, Lightspeed Systems, Turnitin and Grammarly, state none of the three. The pattern is not a scandal and it is not evidence that anyone is careless. Newer listings were built with the compliance fields in the form; older, better-known tools were listed before those fields existed, and nobody went back. But the practical consequence is sharp: the tools with the cleanest privacy record on paper are the ones nobody has tried, and the tools everyone uses have blank records. A blank is not a red flag. It is an instruction to go and read the vendor's own policy, which is what we did for each of the six below.
Four questions that pick your tool in about five minutes
Answer these in order and you will land on one of the six without reading every section.
1. Does the evidence already live in a Google Doc or Classroom? If your comments come from work students submitted digitally, Brisk drafts in place and you skip the copy-paste step entirely. If your evidence lives in a gradebook, a paper gradebook or your head, that advantage disappears.
2. Are you writing 30 comments or 180? Below about 40, the free tier of anything will do. Above 100, generation caps start to bite, and a tool that remembers your tone settings between sessions saves more time than a tool with better prose. That is the line between TeacherMatic's paid tier and everything else.
3. Does your district have a signed agreement with the vendor? If yes, use that tool and stop reading. If no, you are in consumer-account territory, which means you check the training setting yourself and you keep identifiers out of the prompt.
4. Is your worry a bad draft, or an invented one? Most teachers fear the generic comment. The more serious failure is the confident, specific, false one: a tool describing progress a child did not make. If that is your worry, Gemini Notebook is the honest answer, because it will not answer from anything you have not uploaded.
MagicSchool is the best fit for a whole staff on one platform because its free tier covers the report-season tools
MagicSchool gives every teacher 80+ tools at $0 with no trial clock, including Class Writing Feedback, and the same account covers family newsletters and translation (pricing). That matters at report season for a reason that has little to do with report cards: the teacher who drafts a comment on Tuesday is drafting a note home on Thursday, and one login for both is the difference between a tool a staff adopts and one they abandon in October. It carries a 4.74 rating from 19 reviews in the directory, the deepest review base of the six after Brisk and Gemini Notebook.
Its output is structured and warm, and the warmth is the part you rewrite. Comments arrive sounding like a well-meaning stranger who has read the file. Your job is to put back the two specifics that make a parent believe you know their child.
Watch out for: the generic praise sentence. It appears in almost every draft and it is the first thing a parent skims past.
Pricing: Free at $0 forever. Plus is $12.99 per user per month, or $8.33 per user per month billed annually. Enterprise is custom (pricing, checked September 17, 2026).
Safety: The privacy policy states that "MagicSchool does not use personal information to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models," and that AI service providers it engages "are contractually prohibited from using any data processed on MagicSchool's behalf to train, develop, or improve their own models." It also states that students under 18 may only access the service through MagicSchool's agreement with a customer, meaning a school or district contract, not a teacher sign-up (privacy policy). The directory record does not state a hosting location or a FERPA position for MagicSchool, so confirm both with your own district before student data goes in.
TeacherMatic is the best fit for high-volume comment writing because it sells generation capacity outright
TeacherMatic is the only one of the six that prices the thing report season actually consumes: generations. The free plan allows 15 a day for the first week and then 5 a day; Professional raises that to 150 a day and adds the full Feedback generator (pricing). For a teacher facing 180 comments in three weekends, that number is the whole decision, and £6.99 a month is less than the coffee those weekends will cost.
Tone control is its second advantage. You set the register once, formal or warm or direct, and it holds across a batch, which is what keeps 30 comments from reading like 30 different teachers wrote them.
Watch out for: UK phrasing in the defaults. It was built for British schools, so ask for US report card language explicitly, or you will be editing "Year 9" and "marking" out of every draft.
Pricing: Free at £0.00 a month. Professional is £6.99 a month or £69.00 a year. Organizational licenses are quote-based (pricing, checked September 17, 2026). The vendor prices in pounds; there is no published US dollar figure.
Safety: The privacy notice states that data from its Google Workspace integration "is not used for AI or ML training purposes," and names Microsoft Azure in Switzerland as the provider of its LLM services (privacy notice). It does not set out school agreement terms, so a US district will need to ask directly about FERPA and about data leaving the country.
Brisk Teaching is the best fit for drafting where the work already lives because the free plan has no usage cap
Brisk is a Chrome and Edge extension rather than a destination, so it drafts feedback on the student's document without you moving anything. The free teacher plan carries unlimited usage, 20+ tools, all feedback tools, 50+ languages and Brisk Boost, the student-facing side (plans). It holds a 4.77 rating from 35 reviews in the directory, the largest review base of the six.
The saving is not in the writing, it is in the retrieval. A comment written next to the work it describes is a comment with evidence in it, which is the difference between a report a parent argues with and one they accept.
Watch out for: the free plan runs on standard language models and the custom data agreements sit in the paid school tier. A teacher using free Brisk on district-owned student work is relying on the teacher terms, not a district contract.
Pricing: Free at $0 for teachers. Premium for schools and districts is custom-quoted, adding 35+ tools, turbo models, an admin dashboard, custom data processing agreements and rostering. An Intelligence tier for districts adds curriculum tooling (plans, checked September 17, 2026).
Safety: Custom data processing agreements are named as a paid-tier feature, which tells you what you need to know about the free one. The directory record states no hosting location, FERPA position or minimum age. If your students are under 13 or your district has a signed agreement requirement, this is a conversation with your technology director, not a decision you make alone.
Gemini Notebook is the best fit for reports that must stay tied to evidence because it only answers from what you upload
Gemini Notebook, the tool Google renamed from NotebookLM in July 2026, is built around a constraint that happens to be exactly right for report writing: it answers from sources you give it and it tells you which source each claim came from. Upload your running notes, your assessment records and last term's comment, and the draft it produces cannot contain progress the child did not make, because there is nowhere for it to come from. It holds a 4.84 rating from 90 reviews in the directory, the deepest review base of any tool here.
This is the tool for the teacher whose real fear is the confident lie. It is also the slowest of the six to start, because you have to assemble the sources first. That assembly is the work, and it is the work you were going to do anyway.
Watch out for: it drafts stiffly. Sentences come out accurate and flat, so plan on a warming pass. It also will not fill a gap: if your notes on a quiet child are thin, the draft will be thin, which is uncomfortable and correct.
Pricing: Freemium. No public figure for paid tiers was shown when checked on September 17, 2026, so treat the paid cost as unverified until you see a quote.
Safety: Google states that "the content in Gemini Notebook will not be used to directly train our foundational AI models, unless you choose to provide feedback," and that for Google Workspace and Education accounts, uploads, queries and model responses "will not be reviewed by human reviewers" (privacy note). The feedback exception matters here: a thumbs-up on a draft containing a child's name is a decision, so do not click it out of habit.
Diffit is the best fit for the comment a family cannot read because leveling text is the one thing it does
Diffit's job in this workflow is not the draft. It is the pass afterward. Paste your finished comment in, ask for it at a lower reading level, and you get back the same judgment in language a parent who did not finish high school, or who reads English as a second language, can act on. The free individual account produces readings with questions and vocabulary and exports to PDF (pricing).
This is the smallest recommendation on the list and the one most likely to change what a family does, which is the actual point of a report card.
Watch out for: leveling can strip the specific detail that made the comment useful. Check that the named skill survived the rewrite.
Pricing: A free individual teacher account exists. Diffit for Schools and district plans are quote-based; no public figures are published, so this is no public pricing (pricing, checked September 17, 2026).
Safety: The directory record states no hosting location, FERPA position or minimum age, and school terms are quote-based. Level the text with the child's name removed, then put the name back yourself. It costs four seconds and removes the question entirely.
ChatGPT is the best fit as a free fallback because almost every teacher already has it, and it has one setting worth changing today
ChatGPT will draft a report card comment as well as anything on this list. The problem is the default. OpenAI's own help page states that consumer content is used to train models unless you turn it off, and tells you how: Settings, then Data Controls, then switch off "Improve the model for everyone." It also states that "by default, we do not train on any inputs or outputs from our products for business users, including ChatGPT Business, ChatGPT Enterprise, and the API" (data use).
Most teachers using a personal ChatGPT account for report season have never opened that menu. If you take one action from this article, make it that one.
Watch out for: invention. Ask it about a child it knows nothing about and it will produce a fluent, specific, plausible paragraph describing a term that did not happen. Give it your evidence or do not use it.
Pricing: Free at $0. Paid consumer tiers named Go, Plus and Pro exist, but the pricing page did not display figures when checked on September 17, 2026 (pricing), so treat those costs as unverified.
Safety: Consumer accounts train on your content by default until you change the setting above. Business, Enterprise and API accounts do not. If your district has ChatGPT Edu or Enterprise, use that account and not your personal one, and keep student names out of the prompt either way.
When to choose something else
Three tools come up constantly in this conversation and are the wrong shape for this job, which is worth saying plainly.
Khanmigo offers teachers free sign-up and on-demand summaries of recent student work (Khanmigo), which makes it a good source of the evidence a report needs, and a poor place to write the report itself. District pricing is quote-based.
Class Companion builds the feedback trail across a semester, which is the raw material for a strong comment, but its pricing is quote-based with a two to three week trial, so it is a department decision rather than a thing you adopt in report week.
SchoolAI holds the highest directory rating of any tool mentioned here, 4.92 from 13 reviews, and it is built around student-facing spaces. In a district that has just restricted student AI access, that is the wrong tool to be piloting this month.
A worked example: one seventh-grade science comment, start to finish
Here is the process on a single comment, so the abstraction has a shape. This is a plan you can follow on Monday, not a result anyone is reporting.
The student. Seventh grade, general science, second quarter. Your evidence: three lab reports scoring 14, 17 and 22 out of 25; a unit test at 61 percent; two notes in your gradebook, "strong in practical work, will not write the conclusion" and "asked to redo the density lab, did it without being chased."
Step one, assemble, two minutes. Put those five facts in a plain list. Do not write sentences yet. This is the step people skip and it is the one that decides whether the comment is true.
Step two, draft, one minute. Give the list to your tool with the register you want and the length your district requires. A usable instruction: "Write a 90-word second-quarter science report card comment for a seventh grader from these facts. Warm but direct. Name one specific strength, one specific next step. Do not add anything not in the list."
Step three, check for invention, thirty seconds. Read the draft against your list and delete any claim that is not on it. In our experience of what these tools produce, the invented sentence is usually about attitude or peer relationships, because those are the sentences that sound like report cards.
Step four, put yourself back in, one minute. The lab report trajectory from 14 to 22 is the story, and no tool will know that it matters more than the 61 percent test. Say so in your own words.
Step five, the family pass, thirty seconds. If the household reads English as a second language, level it, then restore the child's name.
Five minutes a comment, and the four minutes of it that matter are yours. Thirty comments is two and a half hours, which is a Saturday morning rather than a weekend.
How to actually choose
The rule underneath all of this is the one worth keeping when the tool names have changed: outsource the doing, not the thinking.
The doing is grammar, structure, register, length and the fourth rewording of a sentence you have already written 29 times. Hand all of it over. The thinking is the judgment about what this child needs to hear next, and that judgment is the only thing on a report card a family cannot get anywhere else. A tool that saves you three hours and quietly replaces that judgment with plausible warmth has cost you more than it saved.
Gallup's national survey of 2,232 US public school teachers, conducted March 18 to April 11, 2025 for the Walton Family Foundation, found that three in 10 teachers use AI weekly and estimate saving 5.9 hours a week, and that the share reporting better work quality ranges "from 57% for grading and feedback to 74% for administrative work" (Gallup). The gap between those two numbers is the point. Teachers are most confident about AI where their own judgment is least involved, and least confident where it is most involved. Report cards sit at the judgment end.
Our view is that the right pattern for report season is one platform for the draft, chosen on your district's agreement rather than on features, plus five minutes of your own thinking per child. If you want to compare the field yourself, the lesson planning and resource creation category holds 40 tools with pricing, hosting and compliance fields side by side, and the security assessments page is the place to start if your district is doing a formal review.
If reports are the end of a chain rather than a standalone job, two neighboring pieces are worth reading: the tools that give written feedback on student work generate the evidence a comment is built from, and the tools for preparing parent-teacher conferences cover the conversation that follows the report going home. Teachers searching in the UK for help with marking and end-of-year school reports will find the same six tools apply, with TeacherMatic the closest fit for British phrasing.
The short answer
Pick on your district's agreement first, your volume second, and the prose last. MagicSchool if the whole staff needs one thing. TeacherMatic if you are writing hundreds and want tone locked. Brisk if the work is already in a Doc. Gemini Notebook if you need the draft chained to evidence. Diffit for the family who has to read it. ChatGPT if nothing else is approved, with the training setting off.
Then spend the time you saved on the one sentence per child that only you could write.
Dan Fitzpatrick is a Forbes contributor, bestselling author and founder of The AI Educator. He has trained 150,000+ educators and advises schools, trusts and government bodies across the UK, US and internationally on AI strategy.
