If it's you, one worksheet and tonight, use ChatGPT. It's good at that. The problem starts at the point where it's 120 students, their parents, and a term.
What it's good for
Genuinely good, not grudgingly.
You've got a PDF of your Year 9 algebra notes and you want five worked examples with different numbers. Paste it in, ask, and you'll have them in a minute. You want a parent email reworded so it's shorter. Done. You want to check whether your explanation of a method is clear to someone who isn't you. Ask it to explain it back. You want a rubric turned into a checklist a casual tutor can hold. Done.
That's real work it saves, for one person, on one document, in one evening. If you're not doing it already, try it, and the AI in tutoring centres guide has more of these.
NotebookLM is a step better for the one-document case, because it answers from the documents you give it and cites them rather than answering from everywhere. Give it your notes and ask it questions about your notes and you'll get answers about your notes. For an owner sitting alone with a folder, that's the better tool.
The question to ask before you scale it
"How would I get the results back from 120 kids?"
Sit with that for a moment, because it's the whole gap. Say you've had a good evening with the chatbot, made a set of practice questions from your material, and you like them. Now what?
You send them to the students. How? A PDF, by email, to 120 families. They do them, on paper or on a phone. Then what? The answers come back, or don't. Who marks them? Against what? Where do the marks go? Which student got which question wrong, and which topic did most of the class miss? Who tells the parents, and what do they say?
ChatGPT doesn't know who your students are. It has no classes, no due dates, no marking against your key, no grid on Monday morning, no report on Friday. It made a document. Everything after the document is still you, and everything after the document is where the hours were.
What it can't do for 120 students
| You need | ChatGPT | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Set a week's work for a class with a due date | No classes | Classes and assignments from your material |
| Mark 120 submissions against your answer key | It doesn't see submissions | Instant marking, equivalent forms recognised |
| See which topic the class got wrong | No grid | A tutor dashboard with a heatmap by topic |
| Send 120 parents a report with your logo, from your address | No parents, no logo, no address | Fortnightly parent reports, branded to you |
| Stop a student getting the answer handed to them | It gives the answer | Hints before answers, from your page |
| Approve what students see before they see it | No approval step | Approve before publish |
None of that is a criticism of the tool. It's a chatbot. It was built to answer one person. A centre is a system of 120 people plus their parents plus tutors who change every term, and a system needs plumbing a chatbot doesn't have.
The two risks that matter more than the plumbing
The first is what it answers from. A general chatbot answers from everything it's ever read, which means a student who asks it for help with your ratios worksheet gets a method from somewhere, and it might not be yours. If you teach cross-multiplication one way and a student learns it another way at 9pm from a chatbot, you spend Tuesday unteaching it. It also, sometimes, gets things confidently wrong, and a student can't tell. The hallucination entry in the glossary is the short version.
The second is that a student can ask it for the answer. They will. A general chatbot writes the essay, does the set, and hands it over, because that's what it's for. There's no hint, no worked example with different numbers, no "try this first," and no record for the tutor of who needed help with what.
And a smaller one, worth reading the terms on: what a consumer tool does with what you paste into it. Your worksheets are your business. Before a folder of them goes into any tool, it's worth knowing what that tool's terms say about storing and training on it, and if you're not sure, ask someone who reads terms for a living.
Where the platform sits
The platform uses AI too, under one rule: it only ever works from your material, and you approve everything before a student sees it. The explanation a student gets at 9pm is drawn from your worksheet and cites the page. It gives a hint first, an example second, the worked solution last, and the tutor sees how many steps each student used. If your material doesn't cover something, it says so and suggests Tuesday. The stuck at 9pm page goes through it.
That's a narrower thing than a chatbot, on purpose. The comparison with ChatGPT and NotebookLM lays the two side by side, including where the chatbot wins.
This week
Use ChatGPT tonight on one document, for yourself, and notice how much it saves you. Then write down what you'd have to do to get that document to a class, marked, back in a grid, and reported to the parents. That list is what you're actually deciding about.