A second pair of hands for teachers. A patient tutor for pupils.
Tendao already holds your classes: the marks, the hand-ins, the scheme of work. So the AI can answer from your school’s own records, and a pupil can get help the moment they are stuck.
It stays off until your school switches it on.
Ask Tendao
Teacher: Who in Form 4 Blue hasn’t handed in the quadratics homework?
Tendao: Three pupils: Farai Moyo, Rudo Chari and Simba Gumbo. The work closed on Monday.
For teachers: ask in plain words.
Who has not handed in? Which pupils are at risk? How far behind is the scheme of work? What are the pass rates? Tendao answers from the classes you teach, and only those.
A first draft, never a final copy.
Ask for a revision assignment and it opens in the usual assignment form, ready to change. Ask for help marking a photographed hand-in and you get a suggested mark and feedback.
Nothing is saved until the teacher checks it and saves it. The mark is always the teacher’s.
For pupils: a tutor for each subject.
Pupils from Form 1 to Upper 6 get a tutor for each subject group they are in. It knows the subject, this term’s scheme of work, the topics covered so far and the teacher’s materials.
Pupils can type a question or send a photo of their working. The tutor is told to coach them through it, one step at a time, and not to do their homework for them.
Mathematics tutor
Your teacher and the school’s administrators can read these conversations.
Photo of my working
Pupil: I moved the 5 across but now I’m stuck.
Tutor: Your first line is right. What could you do to both sides to leave x on its own?
Teachers stay in charge.
A teacher can add instructions for a group’s tutor, or switch it off for the whole group or for one assignment.
The group’s teacher and the school’s administrators can read every conversation, and pupils are told this on the screen. Parents cannot read them.
What it cannot promise.
AI can be wrong. The tutor is told to flag a conversation that worries it, and flagged conversations are listed first for teachers to read. That is an instruction to the AI, not a guarantee: it can miss things, and it does not alert anybody by itself.
Primary and ECD pupils do not get a tutor.
Limits that keep the cost fixed.
The AI help is part of the per-pupil price. To keep it that way, each school has a monthly limit and each person a daily one, with a smaller one for pupils. An administrator can see how much the school has used this month.
Questions schools ask
Tendao uses Claude, made by Anthropic. When the AI is switched on, the question and the class information needed to answer it are sent to Anthropic. The school’s settings page says so before an administrator turns it on.
No. The AI can only read what the person asking could already see in Tendao.
The person sees a plain message saying they have reached the limit, and can ask again the next day, or next month for the school’s limit.
