Have Berdee Build a Lesson
Describe the lesson you want, approve the plan, watch the checklist tick off, open the draft — then change it in the same conversation.
Ask for a lesson in your own words and Berdee writes the whole thing — scenes, questions, pictures, narration, and grading — while you watch. You approve a plan before any of it is built, and nothing is published or handed to students until you say so.
Building lessons with the Assistant is part of Plus and Studio Pro. The Free plan doesn't include AI features, so on Free, Assistant opens a page that explains what it does and links to Plans instead of a chat. For how-to questions on any plan, search the help center.
Open Assistant in the sidebar and describe what you want:
- "A 4-scene lesson on the water cycle for grade 3, ending with a short quiz."
- "Fractions practice for 5th grade — a few multiple-choice questions and one put-in-order question."
- "Intro to the parts of a plant with a labelled diagram and two check questions."
The more you say about the grade, the topic, and the kind of practice you want, the closer the first draft lands. For everything else the assistant does — answering how-to questions in the same chat — see The Assistant.
Before you start: room for one more lesson
A lesson Berdee builds is a draft in your library like any other, so it counts toward your plan's lesson limit. The limit is checked the moment Berdee starts planning a lesson — not when you open the chat. If you're already at the limit, Berdee tells you right there in the chat — _"You've reached your plan's lesson limit, so I can't start a new lesson right now"_ — before anything is planned or spent. Delete a draft you no longer need, or see Plans for more room.
Questions are never blocked by the lesson limit. Asking how something works keeps working whether or not you have room for another lesson; only starting a new lesson stops.
A question or two first
If something important is missing, Berdee asks before it plans anything. The questions are the ones that change the whole lesson — the grade, how much of it should teach versus ask, and how many scenes it should have. Click the option that fits, or type your own answer.
It won't interrogate you. Anything you already said is taken as given — say "an 8-question quiz" and you get eight question scenes without being asked how many — and there's a firm limit on how many questions you'll get; past that, Berdee makes a sensible choice and shows you what it chose.
Seasonal themes
Berdee knows what time of year it is, so one of those questions may be about the look and feel: "What kind of theme should this lesson have?" In October it might offer Halloween or fall colors; in June, summer or a beach day; near a holiday, that holiday. Pick one and the whole lesson follows it — the artwork and the examples themselves, so a themed counting lesson counts pumpkins rather than plain circles.
None of it is required. Choose No theme — keep it neutral, or type your own idea — "space", "under the sea", "our class camping trip" — and Berdee builds around that instead.
The plan comes before the building
You always see a plan before a single scene exists. Berdee first writes the lesson out properly, the way a teacher would sketch it for a colleague, and then posts the plan as a message you can scan:
- The facts — grade band, roughly how long the lesson is, and whether it's scored.
- The scenes, one line each in plain teaching language: "Hook — a photo of a wilting plant and one question about why", "Practice — three multiple-choice on what leaves need", "Check — short quiz". Every lesson opens with a short intro scene and ends with a scene that shows the score.
- Anything Berdee assumed for you, called out so you can correct it.
What you read here is the actual teaching plan, not a summary of a form. If a scene's description sounds wrong to you, it _is_ wrong, and this is the cheapest possible moment to say so.
Under the plan comes one question — _"Ready to build this plan?"_ — with a button to approve and a button to ask for changes. Be specific about what to change: "make scene 3 about roots instead of stems" gets you a better rewrite than "try again". No scene has been written while you go back and forth.
Where the draft comes from
The draft itself appears a little earlier than the plan does. As soon as Berdee has enough to start drafting — after any clarifying questions are answered, but before the plan is posted — it files a draft in your library to hold the work, named after your topic and grade. That is the moment your plan's lesson limit is checked, and the moment a lesson slot is taken. A conversation where you only ask questions never creates one.
If you change your mind before approving, delete that draft the way you'd delete any other: it's an ordinary lesson in your library.
What approving does
Approving is the moment building starts, and the moment the draft gets its real name: the title, description, grade levels, and subject come from the plan you approved, so the lesson shows up under the right name and filters even before the build finishes (a name you've already given the draft yourself is kept). Then Berdee starts writing the scenes.
Each message you send in the Assistant, including the approval, counts as one AI action from your monthly allowance; the build itself, however many scenes and retries it takes, costs nothing extra. See AI and Voice for how allowances work and when they reset.
Watching it build
A build checklist appears in the chat as soon as Berdee starts planning — Looking at similar lessons, Writing the lesson plan, Checking the plan, then Plan approved once you approve — and grows as the work happens: one line for every scene in your plan, then Building your lesson. Each line ticks off as it finishes — scenes are written in parallel, so several tick within seconds of each other — and a line that needs another attempt says so. The checklist stays after the build completes, so you can see exactly what was made.
You can walk away. Close the tab, go to a meeting, come back later — the build keeps going without you. When you open Assistant again, your most recent conversation reopens on its own if it built a lesson or is still building one (it says Continuing and the lesson's name), with the checklist and the finished card exactly where they were. Otherwise click Continue to reopen it. New conversation starts a fresh one instead. Berdee reopens only your most recent conversation from the last 30 days, so starting a new one means you can't go back to the older one. When the build is done you'll see a card reading something like _"Your lesson is ready — 6 scenes · saved as a draft"_ with a Go to the lesson button that takes you straight to it.
Reopening the same conversation matters for more than reading back: changing a lesson from the chat (below) only works in the conversation that built it.
Checked before it's delivered
Before the lesson reaches your library it's checked exactly like the studio checks a lesson before you can assign it — every button leads somewhere real, scenes flow in the right order, the score adds up, and there's a way to finish the attempt — plus one more check the studio can't do: that what was built matches the plan you approved.
Anything that fails those checks is not delivered. Berdee retries the scene it came from, and if it can't get it right it stops and tells you plainly what went wrong and what happens next — you will never be left staring at a spinner that never resolves, and you will never receive a lesson that can't be played. Smaller things worth a look (a scene that came out shorter than planned, say) are delivered and mentioned in the chat so you know where to glance first.
The pictures
Berdee generates a fresh illustration for the image spots during the build, in one consistent style and in the colors of the lesson's theme — the lesson arrives with real pictures already in place, each with a short written description (alt text) written while Berdee still knew why the image matters.
A build generates at most 12 pictures; in a lesson with more image spots than that, the rest stay placeholders. Every picture description is screened before anything is generated. If one is refused, or a picture simply fails to come out, that spot stays a placeholder and the rest of the lesson is unaffected — a build never fails because of a picture. A skipped picture isn't called out scene by scene, so it's worth a look through the lesson when it lands: an empty picture spot is the thing to fill in, from the studio's image widget.
To replace any picture, open the image widget in the studio: Generate Images with AI, Find Stock Images, or upload your own — the same sources you'd use for any lesson.
Why the alt text matters
Alt text is the sentence a student's screen reader says out loud in place of the picture. A student who can't see the image gets that sentence instead — so if the picture is doing teaching work, the sentence has to do the same work. _"A rain cloud with three raindrops falling into a puddle"_ tells a student something; _"image"_ tells them nothing. Berdee fills it in for every generated picture; if you swap a picture, check the description still fits.
Narration and sound
Where a lesson includes spoken narration — Berdee reaches for it for pre-readers and emerging readers — the audio is recorded during the build. When your lesson arrives, its narration is already there and plays for students without any extra step from you. Every narrated word is also on screen, so narration is a support, never the only way to get the content.
Open any narration widget in the studio to edit the script, change the voice, and regenerate that clip. If a clip fails to come out during the build, that widget simply arrives silent with its text intact — open it and press generate. See Text to Speech for the voice widget itself.
Sound effects
Where a single sound would make a moment land — a moo when the cow appears, a wave crash on the ocean scene — Berdee can generate that too. Effects are invisible in the lesson: nothing renders, the sound simply plays when the scene loads. Each one appears in the studio as a small audio widget holding the description it was generated from — select it to change the sound, swap in your own clip, or delete it. Berdee uses them sparingly, at most one per scene, and only where they serve the teaching.
Changing a lesson you already built
You don't start over to fix a scene. Stay in the same conversation and say what to change:
- Change the content of a scene — _"make scene 3 harder"_, _"add one more example to the fractions scene"_, _"reword question 2"_. Berdee rewrites only the scenes you named and leaves every other scene exactly as it is.
- Change the plan — _"add one practice scene"_, _"drop the flashcard scene"_, _"put the quiz before the recap"_. Berdee re-plans, shows you only what changed, asks you to approve it, then rewrites the scenes the change touches and their immediate neighbours so the lesson still flows. Everything else is carried over.
Either way it updates the same lesson — same place in your library, same assignments — and the scenes it didn't touch keep any edits you've made in the studio. Each round is a new version of the draft, so your earlier version is one click away in History and Restore.
If you've edited a scene in the studio that a change would rewrite, Berdee asks before touching it — Replace my edits on those scenes or Keep my edits — rather than quietly overwriting your work.
Changes happen in the conversation that built the lesson. If you've left the page, open Assistant again to come back to it (click Continue if it doesn't reopen on its own) — a fresh conversation doesn't know the lesson, and asking there gets you a brand-new lesson rather than a change to this one.
In the chat, the checklist shows each round as its own group — Changes · round 1, round 2, and so on — with a line per scene being rewritten, and the finished card reads _"Your lesson is updated"_ with how many scenes were rewritten and how many were kept. A lesson can be changed this way up to ten times in one conversation, and a change that didn't finish still counts as one. After that, start a New conversation and describe the lesson you want next — the delivered lesson stays in your library, and you can keep editing it in the studio.
Colors and fonts aren't changed from the chat. The look is a lesson-level theme; to switch it, use the studio's ⋯ → Settings menu — see Themes and Palettes.
If something goes wrong
If a build can't finish — a scene keeps failing its checks, or Berdee hits its own internal ceiling — it stops and tells you plainly. You're never handed a broken lesson, and nothing beyond the messages you actually sent counts against your allowance.
Once in a while a build stops without a word: the chat just goes quiet, usually because Berdee was updated or restarted mid-build. Berdee notices within about half an hour. Your lessons list then marks the draft Build stopped with a Continue in Assistant link, and Assistant reopens that conversation saying the last build stopped before it finished. Send a message like "Try again" and Berdee picks the build up in the same conversation, into the same draft. Only the message you send counts against your allowance.
You'll also get an honest stop rather than a bad lesson if the request is outside what Berdee can build, if a request is refused by Berdee's content screening, or if you've run out of AI allowance for the month.
Rarely, Berdee pauses starting new lessons for everyone for the rest of the day. The chat tells you when that happens. It isn't about your plan or your usage, it lifts at midnight UTC, and lessons already being built finish as normal.
It's your lesson
A finished build lands in your library as a draft — Go to the lesson opens it in the studio with the title, description, grades, and subject already filled in and one of Berdee's house themes applied for the grade band. Everything is yours to change — the wording, the pictures, the point values, the theme, the order of the scenes.
Preview it like a student before you assign it. That's the step worth not skipping: see Preview and Test a Lesson.