Lesson Orbit: AI lesson plans with three tiers of support for K-12 teachers

01 / Overview

About Lesson Orbit

02 / The challenge

What Lesson Orbit needed to solve

Lesson Orbit had to turn the documents teachers already have into one plan for a mixed-ability class, without exposing student names.

1. 01

   Writing one plan that serves every level and cites the right standard takes hours, usually in the evening.

2. 02

   Test results show students at very different levels, so the plan had to give each group the right amount of support.

3. 03

   The tool had to read the PDFs and reports teachers already have, such as curriculum guides and Star Math test reports.

4. 04

   Student names had to stay away from the AI model.

03 / What we built

How we built Lesson Orbit

We built a React web app on an Express and MongoDB API. The server reads and sorts the documents, places each student in a tier by fixed rules, and then asks the model to draft the plan.

• 01

  Curriculum upload and extraction

  Uploaded curriculum guides are split into pages, summarized and mined for standards. Each guide shows its page chunks, standards, target grade and word count, with an expert summary and focus clusters.

• 02

  Test report parsing

  Class test reports, including Star Math PDFs and CSV files, are parsed into a learner matrix with each student's score, scaled score and percentile. Each data set shows when it was synced and how many students it covers.

• 03

  Three tiers by fixed rules

  Every student is placed in Tier 1 Proficiency, Tier 2 Strategic or Tier 3 Intensive by fixed rules, not by the model. Teachers see how many students sit in each tier for every data set.

• 04

  Three-step lesson generator

  Creating a lesson takes three steps: choose a curriculum, choose the student data, then generate. The model drafts a base plan and a version for each tier, each with an objective, materials and an instructional sequence.

• 05

  Edit and export

  Teachers edit any tab of the plan and export it to PDF or Word. My Lesson Plans lists every draft with its grade, aligned standard, date and class size, and can be searched by objective or standard.

• 06

  Student privacy

  Student names are kept away from the AI model. Tiers are worked out on the server before the model writes anything.

• 07

  Sign-in, trials and subscriptions

  Sign-in supports Google, email codes and authenticator-app two-factor login. New teachers get a 30-day trial, Stripe handles subscriptions, and a nightly job closes expired trials.

• 08

  One client for every AI call

  All AI calls share one small client, so the model provider is a setting. The API is organized into routes, controllers and services, with Zod checks and role-based access.

04 / The results

What changed for Lesson Orbit

Lesson Orbit covers the whole path from document to draft.

• A teacher uploads two files and gets a standards-aligned plan with three levels of support.
• Teachers edit, export and review each plan in the same app, and download it as PDF or Word.
• Students are sorted into tiers by fixed rules, and their names are kept away from the AI model.
• Trials, paid plans and an admin console cover the business side.
• The model provider can change without rewriting the features that use it.