What could your teachers do with an extra three hours every week? In Volusia County Schools, the answer is even higher-quality instruction. Using IgniteAI Question Authoring Assistance in Canvas, which is also available in Mastery, teachers are building rigorous, standards-aligned assessments in minutes instead of hours.
Recently, I (virtually) sat down with a group of educators from Volusia County Schools in Florida, which serves 60,000+ students across 89 schools. These educators are participating in Volusia’s AI Academy. The program brings together classroom teachers, instructional coaches, and specialists who are exploring how AI can support everyday teaching and learning.
For teachers, creating quizzes is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job. Writing questions, aligning them to standards, building answer choices, and formatting everything into a usable assessment can take hours each week.
Saving time on quiz creation with IgniteAI
Discussing IgniteAI Question Authoring Assistance, two teachers expressed during the session:
“This is such a time-saver for us.”
“To create the questions the old way could take hours… with AI it takes five or ten minutes.”
Instead of manually drafting every question, teachers can prompt the tool to generate questions directly from their course material. The tool then prompts them to review each question before publishing, saving time spent on writing first drafts while ensuring that a human is always in the driver’s seat.
Across the group, educators estimated that the feature is saving two to three hours each week on quiz creation alone.
Higher-order thinking and quiz creation
But what stood out most during the discussion wasn’t just the time savings. Teachers were equally excited about how the tool helps them design better assessments. Several educators shared that using IgniteAI to generate questions from their course content is changing how they approach creating quizzes.
Many of the educators in Volusia County are deeply familiar with instructional frameworks like Bloom’s Taxonomy and Depth of Knowledge (DOK). With Question Authoring Assistance, they can guide IgniteAI to generate questions that target different cognitive levels.
One teacher described generating small batches of questions across different DOK levels to intentionally build a more balanced quiz. That approach allows them to assess not only basic recall but also deeper student understanding.
Building quizzes from custom course content
Another advantage educators highlighted was the ability to customize assessments to match what they actually teach.
Many teachers rely on publisher test banks, but those resources often don’t perfectly align with classroom instruction. Sometimes the questions assess content that wasn’t covered. Other times, the material feels outdated or disconnected from students.
With IgniteAI Question Authoring Assistance, teachers can create assessments based directly on their own course content, learning outcomes, and instructional goals. The difference is clear:
“The results were better than any other AI tool I’ve used.”
One educator explained that this flexibility helps them better assess the standards that matter most in their classroom, rather than relying on generic publisher questions.
The experience is also shaping how teachers think about assessment design more broadly. One teacher shared that reviewing AI-generated questions has helped them discover new ways to phrase questions and to assess understanding. In that sense, the tool isn’t just accelerating work. It’s also helping educators refine their own instructional practices.
Volusia County’s AI Academy reflects a growing trend across districts: educators are eager to explore how AI can reduce repetitive tasks while strengthening teaching and learning.
Tools like IgniteAI Question Authoring Assistance aren’t replacing teacher expertise. Instead, they’re helping teachers spend less time on manual question writing and more time focusing on instruction, student feedback, and the learning experiences that matter most—or, as one Volusia teacher put it, “less time working on weekends!”
You can read more about using IgniteAI Question Authoring Assistance, and enable it as a feature option today!
