Brisk Teaching Review (2026) — AI Inside Google Docs and Word

What it does: The flagship surface. A browser extension that puts a Brisk side panel directly inside Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Classroom, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Teachers select text, click a Brisk action, and get an AI output in the same doc — no copy-paste, no second tab.

Honest assessment: This is the heart of the product and it is genuinely well-built. The in-document workflow is faster than any AI tool that lives on a separate site — by the second use you stop thinking about Brisk as a tool and start thinking about it as a feature of Google Docs. If your day is built around Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the friction reduction is real. The trade-off is the obvious one: the moment you leave Docs, the workflow does not follow you.

What it does: Select a passage of text inside a Google Doc and Brisk rewrites it at a higher or lower reading level — useful for differentiating a single resource for multiple ability bands in the same classroom.

Honest assessment: Probably Brisks single most-used feature in the wild, and rightly so. It is the closest competitor to Diffit on this specific job and the in-document experience is faster than Diffits. Output quality is solid, occasionally needs a manual tweak for tone or for keeping a specific keyword. For a teacher running mixed-ability groups inside one shared Doc, this is the workflow that pays for itself first.

What it does: Brisk reads a student response inside a Doc and drafts feedback — strengths, areas to grow, next steps, or rubric-aligned comments — that the teacher edits and posts back. Bulk feedback is positioned as a paid-tier feature.

Honest assessment: Useful, especially as a first draft you trim down rather than a final comment you ship raw. The strength is speed: a stack of 30 short-answer responses goes from an evening to a coffee-length pass. The honest weakness is depth — feedback can lean generic on shorter responses, and rubric-aligned mode is only as good as the rubric you paste in. Treat it as a productivity multiplier, not as the marker. Bulk / batch feedback at scale sits on the paid tier.

What it does: Brisk can replay how a student wrote a Google Doc — keystrokes, paste events, time-on-doc — to surface whether work was typed, pasted from elsewhere, or generated by AI in the doc.

Honest assessment: Genuinely one of the more thoughtful takes on AI detection on the market, because it does not pretend to be a magic AI classifier. It surfaces signals (large pastes, no editing process, suspicious time gaps) that a teacher can interpret in the context of the student rather than handing down a binary verdict. Still: no AI detection is reliable enough to be the sole basis of an academic-integrity call, and Brisk would not claim otherwise. Use it as a conversation starter with a student, not as evidence.

What it does: Generate a lesson plan, slide deck, quiz or rubric inside a Google Doc, Slide deck or Form from a short prompt — Brisk fills out the resource in the active doc rather than spitting out a download.

Honest assessment: Solid but not the centre of gravity. The generated outputs are usable as a starting point and the in-doc delivery is convenient. Where it lags teacher-first planning products (Kuraplan, MagicSchool) is depth: lighter curriculum tuning, less control over plan structure, fewer plan formats, no native alignment with NZ Curriculum, Australian Curriculum v9, UK National Curriculum or NCEA Levels 1-3. Brisk is an in-document AI assistant with planning tools attached, not a planning-first product. Good for a quick scaffold; thin if planning is your main job.

What it does: A newer surface alongside the extension: a standalone Brisk web app for the planning workflows that benefit from more room than the side panel — multi-step lesson builds, longer rubrics, planning across multiple resources.

Honest assessment: A sensible response to the extension-only ceiling and a clear sign Brisk knows browser-only is a constraint. In practice the web app is still earlier-stage than the extension — fewer surfaces, less polish, and the gravity of the product is still inside the side panel. If your bottleneck is depth on the planning side, the web app does not yet close the gap with planning-first tools. Worth knowing it exists; not yet the reason to pick Brisk.

Diffit — the deepest differentiation alternative

Diffit is the closest direct alternative to Brisks level-up / level-down workflow, and the deepest tool on the market specifically for differentiating reading material. It will take a text, an article URL, a YouTube video or a topic and produce a leveled passage, vocabulary support, comprehension questions and short-response prompts aligned to the chosen reading level. Brisk wins on the in-doc workflow; Diffit wins on the depth and structure of the differentiation output itself. For teachers whose primary job is leveling material for mixed-ability groups, Diffit is worth a serious look — often paired with Brisk rather than instead of it.

MagicSchool — the broader all-rounder

MagicSchool is the broader competitor that ships 70+ teacher tools, a deep lesson-planning library and a student-facing AI experience under one roof. The teacher side is richer than Brisks planning surfaces — more tools, more structured planning formats, more polish — while the student-facing side is something Brisk does not aim for at all. If your school wants one platform that does both teacher planning and a supervised student AI surface reasonably well (rather than picking the best-in-class for each), MagicSchool is the most common single-vendor answer in 2026.