Imagine reclaiming a whole day of your work week. That’s exactly what educators at St Francis College experienced during their Microsoft 365 Copilot trial, with participants reporting an average time savings of 9.3 hours weekly.
This time savings is especially significant in a profession where burnout is all too common. As St Francis College Principal John Marinucci observed, Copilot transforms education by expediting those administrative tasks that often overwhelm educators. The result? Teachers have more energy and time to focus on what brought them to education in the first place—helping students learn and grow.
Your AI assistant for education
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the AI chat experience you can use every day. It’s powered by broad knowledge from the web, built on the latest AI models, and designed to be safe and secure. Copilot Chat includes free, secure AI chat powered by GPT-4o, agents accessible right in the chat, and IT controls, including enterprise data protection and agent management. In addition, pay-as-you-go agents are available for Microsoft 365 education customers through Copilot Chat.
Moving forward, educational institutions will have a mix of Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot. While Copilot Chat is an excellent starting point for integrating AI into your day-to-day workflow, Microsoft 365 Copilot offers all the features of Copilot Chat and additional capabilities to transform educational experiences. Integrated into the apps you use every day, Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of the latest AI models with your data—documents, presentations, emails, meetings, chats, and more—plus the web to deliver relevant responses with sources.
Smart help across your apps
Unlike other AI tools, Copilot works within your Microsoft 365 environment to provide contextually relevant assistance.
- In Word, you can draft and refine documents—such as lesson plans and reports—in seconds that might otherwise take hours.
- In PowerPoint, you can transform basic content into engaging visual presentations that are tailored to your needs.
- In Excel, you can analyze data and identify patterns that inform instructional and policy decisions—without complex formula creation.
- In Outlook, you can more easily manage communications by drafting clear messages and summarizing important information from lengthy email threads.
- In Microsoft Teams, you can capture key points from meetings, organize action items, and help manage collaborative projects more efficiently.
- Copilot Chat turns your organizational content into a rich database of information and insight, enabling you to collaborate with Copilot like a partner to perform tasks in a single interface.
- Use agents to make Copilot your own. Easily build an agent right in Copilot Chat or SharePoint with agent builder and explore agents pre-built for you.
Copilot is your AI assistant that frees up time for what matters most and transforms education experiences, bringing opportunity to life through customization.
Enhancing efficiency with Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot helps you balance strategic vision with day-to-day operations. Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command and can reason over all your content and context to take on any task using natural language—freeing you to focus on what matters most.
Data-driven decision making
Educational leadership increasingly demands evidence-based approaches to resource allocation, program evaluation, and strategic planning. Copilot helps you analyze complex data sets, identify meaningful patterns, and communicate your findings effectively to various stakeholders.
Try these prompts:
- Analyze this attendance data spreadsheet and identify any concerning patterns or trends that might require intervention.
- Summarize the key findings from our quarterly assessment data and suggest three to five focus areas based on the results.
- Write a data-informed narrative for our school board presentation that explains our resource allocation decisions for next year.
Streamlining admin tasks and communication
Education leaders often manage extensive communications, creating and reviewing documentation, and coordinating across departments. By using Copilot to streamline these tasks, you can spend less time on paperwork and more time on the people-focused aspects of leadership.
Try these prompts:
- Create a template for our weekly staff communication that includes sections for celebrations, important dates, and professional development opportunities.
- Help me organize this folder of policy documents by creating an executive summary of each document with key points highlighted.
- Draft a grant proposal outline based on our school improvement goals and the requirements in this funding announcement.
Preparing presentations
School leaders need to process large amounts of data and present findings in clear, impactful ways to support decision-making. Copilot can transform how you analyze and communicate educational data, helping you create meaningful visualizations and distill complex information into actionable insights that drive improvement.
Try these prompts:
- Help me create a slide that clearly shows the relationship between our new reading program implementation and student achievement scores.
- Build a presentation about our school’s new academic programs and initiatives for tonight’s Alumni Donor event.
- Turn the insights I prepared in this Word document into an 8-10 slide presentation for the conference I’m attending next week.
Classroom-ready prompts for Copilot Chat
Copilot Chat helps you tackle time-consuming and repetitive tasks so you can focus on what matters most. View links to sources, generate images, summarize or analyze files, and more. Get started with Copilot Chat for free with this collection of prompts designed to help you save time by streamlining your daily tasks.
Lesson planning and curriculum development
Creating engaging, standards-aligned lesson plans often requires hours of preparation time. Copilot Chat can generate structured frameworks, differentiate existing content, and help align materials with curriculum standards—all while preserving your unique teaching approach and classroom needs.
Try these prompts:
- Create a 7th-grade science lesson plan on photosynthesis that includes a hands-on activity, digital resources, and assessment options aligned with NGSS standards.
- Transform my lecture notes on algebraic equations into an interactive lesson with think-pair-share activities and real-world application problems.
Assessments and rubrics
Developing varied assessments that accurately measure understanding across different learning levels is challenging and time intensive. Copilot Chat helps you create diverse question types, design clear rubrics, and craft personalized feedback to support student success.
Try these prompts:
- Create a rubric for assessing a persuasive essay from 10th-grade students, with criteria for argument structure, evidence quality, and mechanics.
- Draft three versions of constructive feedback for students who struggle with supporting their arguments with evidence in their history essays.
Content personalization
Educational research consistently shows that addressing different learning styles improves engagement and retention. Copilot Chat helps you transform existing materials to meet different learning needs.
Try these prompts:
- Convert this text explanation of the water cycle into a visual learning aid with minimal text for visual learners.
- Adapt this worksheet on fractions to make it more accessible for students with dyslexia, including font and layout recommendations.
Communication
Clear, consistent communication with caregivers and colleagues is essential but often time-consuming. Copilot Chat helps you craft professional messages, summarize student progress, and prepare for conferences with organized, actionable information.
Try these prompts:
- Help me organize student data from this spreadsheet into a narrative format I can use during parent-teacher conferences, highlighting strengths and growth areas.
- Create a template for weekly classroom updates that I can send to families, with sections for curriculum highlights, upcoming events, and celebration moments.
Get started with Copilot
When introducing Copilot to your institution, consider starting with a small pilot group of educators who can explore its capabilities and develop best practices before you move forward with wider implementation. This approach allows your organization to identify the most valuable use cases and identify training opportunities.
To help you and your team build competency with AI and Copilot, check out these resources:
- AI for educators training resources, a comprehensive collection of professional learning opportunities designed specifically for education professionals.
- The Microsoft Education AI Toolkit, a comprehensive resource to assess AI readiness, build strategies, and implement AI in education.
- The Microsoft 365 Copilot Readiness Evaluation Toolkit for Education, a collection of research instruments and resources to help leaders collect insights around Copilot deployment, impact, and use cases.
- The Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot learning path, which walks you through the basics of Copilot.
Ready to explore how you can transform your workflows with a powerful AI assistant? Get started with Copilot today.
