AI Use — ALAMA BN CBC Reports

1. What it is for

The assistant drafts teaching documents — schemes of work, lesson plans, notes — and answers CBC curriculum questions for the class, subject and term a staff member selects. It writes a first version in the layout your school recognises. It does not enter marks, publish results or send anything to parents.

It is optional. Everything it drafts can be written by hand in the same workspace, and a school can simply not use it.

2. What is sent to the AI provider

When a staff member asks for a document or an answer, the request that leaves our server contains teaching context only:

the year and term, class or grade, subject and strand or sub-strand;
the week range and the number of lessons per week, plus lesson duration in minutes;
the teacher's own brief — what the class needs covered;
the school name and the teacher's name, so the draft can be headed correctly;
the text of a file the teacher chose to attach. A PDF, Word file or text document is read in the teacher's own browser and only the extracted text goes with the request; a pasted image is not sent.
if the teacher turns on live search, the question itself is also sent to a search engine (DuckDuckGo) so the answer can cite current curriculum guidance.

3. What is never sent

No learner data. Learner names, admission numbers, UPIs, marks, ranks, remarks and parent contacts are not included in any AI request, and there is no code path that injects the mark sheet into a prompt. The workspace also warns staff not to type learner names into the assistant — please make that a staffroom rule, because a prompt is only as clean as what a teacher pastes into it.

4. Who processes it

Requests are answered by whichever provider the platform owner has configured: Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Groq, or a model served through OpenRouter. The owner can keep a chain of backup keys so a rate-limited provider is stepped over rather than failing the term.

One thing we cannot promise yet. We do not currently send a parameter asking the provider to keep these prompts out of its training data, and we have no written no-training agreement with them. That is a further reason nothing about a learner ever goes into a prompt.

5. Where the keys live

Provider API keys are held on the server — in the owner's settings or in the platform's environment — and are used only when our endpoint builds the outbound request. A browser never receives a key, the workspace has no provider URL to call directly, and the only thing the site can ask the assistant endpoint is "is it available" — which replies with a yes or no and the provider name, nothing more.

6. What is logged

A usage row: which user made a request, and when. That is all. Prompts and answers are not stored — not by us, and there is no transcript table to search. The counters exist so the owner can see load and stay inside provider limits, and they are trimmed to the current window.

7. Review before use

Nothing the assistant produces becomes a school document on its own. The flow is always: request → draft → the teacher edits → the teacher approves or saves. A draft that is never approved never reaches a learner or a parent.

Where an AI draft can mislead, and what to check as you review:

Book and page references. A page number may look plausible and still not match the book your learners actually use. Check it against the copy on your shelf.
Strand and sub-strand order. The curriculum designs are the authority; the assistant is working from them, not from your school's scheme.
Activity feasibility. It will happily suggest a resource your school does not have or an activity that needs a laboratory in a crowded class.
Assessment wording. Test items and report comments must be re-read before they go on a child's paper.
Quiet invention. A confident answer is not a correct answer. If a detail matters, verify it in the curriculum design or your own records.

8. Limits and availability

Each signed-in staff member is limited to 600 assistant requests per hour. A long scheme is broken into batches, so a full term of weekly lessons takes several passes; if a batch is cut short, the workspace fills in the missing weeks instead of starting the term again. The owner account is exempt from the per-user limit. Availability depends on the provider's own capacity — during a busy week the assistant can be slower or briefly unavailable, and marks and documents entered by hand are never affected.

9. A policy for your staffroom

A short written rule keeps the assistant useful and keeps the school's records clean. We suggest the headteacher confirms:

the assistant may be used for planning documents, not for learner data;
every AI draft is reviewed and edited by the teacher who requests it, before it is printed or filed;
book, page and curriculum references are checked against the school's actual copies;
no learner name, mark or parent contact is typed into the assistant, ever;
a scheme written by hand is equally acceptable — the assistant is a shortcut, not a requirement;
if the school reports to a county office that asks about AI use in record-keeping, this page is what you hand over.

Questions about the assistant — including switching it off for your school — go to bonfacenyarega@gmail.com or +254 745 322 445.

How the assistant works, in the open