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AI transparency

AI transparency & user guide

Understand how TeachPie's AI works and make the most of it in your teaching.

Aligned with the GDPR and EU AI Act

TeachPie implements transparency, documentation and oversight measures guided by the GDPR and EU AI Act. However, the specific regulatory classification depends on the particular use case. This handbook shows you the current technical and organizational status of our AI features, their limitations and the associated data processing.

Overview

TeachPie Teacher Handbook

With AI transparency documentation for schools and school authorities
Version: 3.1 · As of: 26.09.2026

This handbook has two parts. Part A is the guide to working with TeachPie, from your first sign-in to giving feedback to your students. Part B explains what happens behind the scenes: which AI is used, what is stored, who makes decisions, and what your school needs to regulate. Part B also serves as the transparency documentation that you can show to your school management or data protection officer.

Your students have their own age-appropriate version of this handbook. It appears in their learning area when they first log in and remains available in their account settings. You can review the published course version in the student view.

Part A — How to use TeachPie

A1 Ready to go in three steps

If this is your first time signing in, there are three steps before your class can work with TeachPie:

  • Create course. A course is your work unit, for example, “Biology · 5a”. Without a course, you only have standalone content.
  • Create lesson. Plan a topic or create materials right away. TeachPie AI works with you.
  • Add, assign and approve students. Share the join code, assign a topic to the class, and publish at least one unit or lesson. Students can only start the learning path once it has been assigned and published.

You can learn everything else later. If you’d prefer a guided start: in Settings, you’ll find under Tutorials the “TeachPie for Teachers” introduction, which guides you through the key areas directly in the interface.

A2 Your teaching area

The teaching area is your home screen. There you’ll find:

  • The sidebar brings together your courses, your content, and the most important links.
  • TeachPie at the top Takes you back to the lesson overview at any time.
  • The menu takes you to settings and the student view. Use the student view to check the published course as your students see it; preview data is kept separate from real student data.
  • TeachPie AI is your teaching conversation partner for questions and lesson planning.
  • Last created shows you new and recently edited content for quick access.
  • The library open via “All”. That's where you'll find your own content and the school-wide resource library.

A3 courses: private or school-provided

A course is always one class plus one subject. The course label shows both, for example, “Biology · 5a”. There are two types:

  • Private courses Create your own via “+” or “New course.” Choose a subject and grade level; everything else is generated automatically. Private courses belong to you, even if you’re a member of a school.
  • School courses is set up centrally by a school administrator under Settings > School > Administration and assigns them to teachers. You won't automatically see every course at your school, only the ones you're enrolled in.

If someone gave you a join code, select “Join course” instead when creating your account, then enter the code.

A4 Plan lessons and create materials

TeachPie thinks about teaching on four levels: Topic → unit → lesson → phase. You don't have to fill in every level, but they help because publishing, materials, learning paths, and progress depend on them.

Describe your project in a conversation with TeachPie AI, and TeachPie will suggest a structure, learning objectives, phases and materials. You decide what to use. You can refine, differentiate, rephrase or discard suggestions at any time.

Materials are created from your description, your planning context, or a photo or PDF. You can edit them in the editor, use AI to modify individual components, add exercises, fill-in-the-blanks, tables, images, and interactive elements, then print, export, or use the result digitally.

Important for solutions: TeachPie derives a student version without solutions from your author version. Solutions, rubrics, and internal diagnostics are not delivered to the student context.

Invite Year 5 pupils to your course

There are two actions for this in the course header: Add student opens the course members directly, Course settings leads, among other things, to Manage members. In the members dialog, you’ll find:

  • the Join code and the Invitation link for this course only,
  • one QR code to the same link,
  • open join requests that you can approve or reject,
  • active members you can remove from this course only.

For a lesson with children who don’t (yet) have an account, there is Learn with your class. You’ll find the button on every lesson, unit, resource and worksheet from the Marketplace; it requires TeachPie Pro. It opens a Round with a code and QR code. It stays open for 90 minutes, can be extended, and can be ended at any time. Children without an account enter only their first name and can start learning this lesson straight away, without waiting for approval. Children with an account log in and learn in their own account. The overview shows you who has joined, how far everyone has progressed, and who has finished; you can remove individual children from the session. AI usage by all children in the session counts toward your quota. Work by children without an account is automatically deleted 14 days after the session ends; only the legally required AI Act logs are retained without names for 180 days. The former guest access via the course is no longer available.

A6 Assign and publish lesson

This is the step that’s easiest to overlook at first: A planned or merely assigned topic isn’t ready for students to start yet. Visibility happens in two stages.

  • Assign: Use “Assign topic” to assign a topic to your class. You can also assign it to specific individual learners or groups, for example, to differentiate instruction.
  • Publish: You can also publish, pause, or withdraw individual units and lessons. Publishing a unit also makes its existing and subsequently materialized lessons available; publishing an individual lesson applies only to that lesson.

Before publishing, it's worth taking a look at the Student view. There, you can check what can actually be started without generating real student progress or class diagnostics.

A7 See how things are going and respond

Once work gets underway, learning progress shows you how your class is doing: by topic, unit, lesson, and phase, with patterns across the group. To view individual pupils, open the School trip. The level of detail shown depends on your school's privacy policy.

Depending on the policy, you’ll see only the phase and approximate position, additional task and phase context, or the current work in progress. Drafts are directly viewable only if the school allows it; otherwise, a submission must have been recorded. These reports are observation aids, not grades or automated decisions.

You can set how much guidance the learning area gives your students for each course: from closely guided to open-ended.

A8 Exams and grading

You can provide tests, collect digital submissions, and have photographed or scanned pages uploaded. TeachPie supports you with transcription, rubrics, and a structured preliminary assessment that flags, for example, spelling, grammar, punctuation, expression, and calculation errors.

This explicitly remains a Pre-correction. It is a draft for you to review. You decide the grade; results only become visible to learners when you explicitly publish them.

A9 Find and share content

  • Library: your topics, units, lessons and materials, which you can organize in folders.
  • Resource collection: Content your staff has shared school-wide. You can open it and create private copies.
  • Marketplace: Worksheets from TeachPie, reviewed by our team of teachers, ready to search, download and add to your library. Only TeachPie can publish there; share with your colleagues through the Fundus.

A10 If you get stuck

  • Tutorials in the settings, the guides take you through the main areas right in the interface; you can restart them at any time.
  • What’s new? shows you product changes that affect your day-to-day work.
  • Feedback in the application or support@teachpie.de goes directly to our support team. Please also report incorrect or inappropriate AI outputs, especially if they affect pupils.

Part B — What happens behind the scenes

AI transparency

B1 What TeachPie is for

TeachPie is an assistant system. It generates suggestions, structures, drafts, guidance, and technically supported analyses. It is not designed to make autonomous decisions and is intended to make professional work easier, not shift responsibility. The final pedagogical, organizational, and assessment-related decisions rest with you, your school, and the other responsible parties.

Alongside you, TeachPie is used by students in the learning area, guests with temporary access, school administrators managing school members and structures, and subject administrators for specific courses expressly assigned to them. Being a member of a class never automatically grants access to every course.

B2 Which AI is used

  • Central text and multimodal processing in the teaching and learning area: Microsoft Azure AI Foundry in Germany with the deployment gpt-6-luna. This includes, in particular, planning, material generation, tutoring support, analysis, and preliminary grading.
  • All other text and analysis processing also run through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry in Germany.
  • Speech recognition For voice input: Azure Speech in the EU. The transcript is then processed like a text input.
  • Text-to-speech for spoken explanations: Azure OpenAI Realtime by default, with Azure Speech as an explicitly configurable fallback, both in the EU.
  • Image generation for materials: Microsoft Azure AI Foundry in the EU.
  • Embeds for searching materials, documents, and curricula: Google Gemini Embedding in the EU.
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in uploaded documents: on TeachPie’s own infrastructure.

Providers, models, and model versions continue to evolve. We document significant changes in this handbook. AI-powered features are identified as such in the interface.

B3 What AI can't do well

  • Hallucinations and factual errors: Outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, or inappropriately generalized, even when they sound convincing.
  • Recognition error: Handwriting, image quality, cropping, perspective, background noise, or foreign languages can impair text, image, and speech recognition.
  • Context dependence: The quality depends heavily on what you enter and the context you provide.
  • Bias and oversimplification: Models may contain unintended biases as well as subject-related and cultural oversimplifications.
  • Diagnostic uncertainty: Progress and competency indicators are based on observable activity signals and provide only an approximate picture of learning progress.
  • Availability: External model providers may occasionally become unavailable or behave differently after model updates.

Therefore, the following uses are not intended: autonomous, unsupervised decisions about learners' performance or behavior; final grades or disciplinary measures based solely on an AI result; use as a medical, psychological or legal expert system; entering unnecessary sensitive personal data in free-text fields; or use as the sole means of supervision during exams or care situations.

B4 Who decides

TeachPie prepares decisions; it doesn’t make them. Specifically:

  • You can edit, discard, regenerate, or overwrite AI-generated content.
  • You explicitly control assignment, publication, pausing and withdrawal; creating planned content alone does not make it visible to learners.
  • TeachPie does not act externally on its own. It does not submit grades or communicate with parents or guardians.
  • Transcription, analysis and preliminary marking are support tools, no automatic final assessment. You or the responsible organization remain accountable for reviewing, assessing and providing feedback on the subject matter and legal compliance.

B5 What is stored and logged

Depending on the feature, inputs, chat histories, task submissions, learning space and notebook content, document and image excerpts, voice recordings for transcription, technical context data and model responses are processed. TeachPie follows the principle of data minimization, but cannot prevent someone from entering or uploading personal data.

  • Work in progress: Chats, progress, task attempts, learning-space pages, and notebook content are saved so work can continue after a reload or when switching devices. Images cropped from the learning space may be included to provide context for a learning step and may be sent to the model.
  • Compliance logging: A separate log is written asynchronously for completed AI interactions. The teaching area logs operational metadata only; input and output content remain empty there. The learning area also logs the triggering contribution and the tutor’s response in a technically length-limited form. Current asynchronous delivery does not yet have a complete end-to-end delivery guarantee.
  • Internal operational and quality logs: AI calls are also recorded internally for monitoring, error analysis, abuse detection, quality assurance and cost control. These logs may contain request and response content, image context provided, model and version details, token and cost values, and technical identifiers. Access is through internal, access-restricted tools and is limited to these purposes.
  • Language features: A voice recording is sent for transcription; the result is treated like a written message and saved with the chat history. The recording itself is not stored in the product as a permanent audio file. Text-to-speech generates audio for immediate playback.
  • Learn with class: A child without an account is given a placeholder account for the session, with no real email address, name or password; their first name is shown only during participation. Their work is automatically and completely deleted 14 days after the session ends, rather than through the account-based deletion request process. Only the AI Act supervision logs are retained without names for 180 days. All AI requests and worksheets for the session count toward your allowance. Children with an account keep their learning path.
  • Environments: Localhost and the shared dev system use the same dev data. Production and isolated tests are separate and must not mix dev and production data.

Model training: TeachPie does not use customer data to train its own base models. According to the published provider information and the enterprise-oriented configuration in use, submitted content is not used to train the general foundation models of these services. This does not categorically rule out technical processing, security filtering or, where applicable, temporary storage by the provider for misuse or quality control.

B6 What you see and what stays private

TeachPie distinguishes between learning paths assigned by you and private learning paths that pupils start themselves.

  • At assigned course content you can always see the learning progress that has been shared with you. Whether you can also open task and phase context, submitted work, the latest draft or the current work in progress depends on the school’s privacy policy.
  • Private learning paths are not included in teacher views. They do not appear in class overviews, student journeys or diagnostics, and are not assigned to a class later.

The learning area tells pupils that their teacher may be able to view course assignments. Still, discuss openly which visibility level your school has chosen and when work in progress and feedback will become visible.

B7 What your school should regulate

  • Which subjects and grade levels TeachPie is used in.
  • Consent, information obligations and age-appropriate explanations.
  • Which teacher visibility settings apply to progress, assignments, drafts, and ongoing work.
  • Rules for exams and assessment situations, as well as for aids used when doing homework.
  • Current school and department administration roles; revoke access for departing people.
  • Whether a data protection impact assessment is required.

TeachPie implements transparency, logging, documentation, and governance measures guided by the requirements of the EU AI Act. The specific regulatory classification depends on the use case; this handbook does not replace an independent legal review by the school or school authority, but provides a technical and organizational basis for it.

Good everyday practice: check subject-relevant statements before use; use clear, factual prompts; limit documents and images to what is necessary; always review manually for assessments, support decisions and sensitive feedback; document how AI outputs were checked and approved in sensitive processes.

B8 Accounts, permissions and reporting channels

You can sign in using your email and password, Google, Microsoft, Eduplaces or a school-managed account. For extra security, multi-factor authentication is available; schools can make it mandatory for certain roles.

The Deleting your account you request in your account settings. The request is confirmed, stored server-side as a data protection signal, and then handled by the service team. This is deliberately not fully automated so that identity, retention periods, and school and license relationships can be carefully verified.

Your rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection exist independently of this handbook. Details about processing, responsibilities and legal bases are set out in the privacy policy. Send requests to kontakt@teachpie.de.

B9 What has changed

Version 3.1 dated 26.09.2026

  • AI providers updated: all text processing via Azure in Germany, image generation via Azure and speech via Azure in the EU, embeddings via Google Gemini Embedding in the EU, text recognition on our own infrastructure (as of 26.09.2026).
  • “Learn with your class” replaces guest access via the course: join a round with a code, learn without an account or individual approval, billing handled by the teacher, and deletion 14 days after it ends (as of 26.09.2026).
  • New structure: first, guidance for everyday work, followed by transparency documentation. The version previously made publicly available was primarily compliance documentation and did little to help people get started.
  • A tailored, age-appropriate version for pupils, accessible in the learning area and account settings.
  • Product wording corrected: The visible unit of work is called Course (class plus subject).
  • Clarified two-stage visibility based on assignment and publication, including inheritance of published units.
  • AI providers and active model paths checked against the current runtime state.
  • Compliance logging is kept separate from internal operational and quality logs, and today's delivery limit is disclosed.
  • Correction to information about voice recordings: Recordings are transcribed and are not stored in the product as permanent audio files.
  • Teacher access is differentiated according to the school’s data protection policy; private learning paths remain completely separate from teacher views.
  • Guest access, retention periods, environment boundaries, accounts, data subject rights and reporting channels added.
  • Consistent use of “you”, in keeping with the rest of the interface.

Version 2.0 dated 20.03.2026: first publicly released version with AI transparency documentation after the switch to Azure as the primary model provider.