Four Layers, Five Verbs
A teacher's map of the Claude ecosystem — for the ESOL, computer skills, and GED classroom. Companion to The Cloud Has an Address.
The Cloud Has an Address told you where this machinery lives — the buildings, the water lines, the power draw, the people who keep it running. This handout is its companion. It maps what the machinery looks like from your side of the screen: what the tools are, what they're for, and what they mean for a teacher whose Tuesday nights belong to twenty-two adults learning English, or a GED cohort three weeks from the science test, or a room of students meeting a spreadsheet for the first time.
The map has four layers. That structure isn't ours — it comes from the explainer videos and product pages, and credit where due: it's a genuinely useful way to organize a sprawling set of tools. We've checked its claims against the documentation, corrected what needed correcting, and translated the examples out of the sales office and into the classroom. What the map's makers left off is the fifth verb. We'll get there.
The Tools You Open
Four products, one subscription, four different jobs. The marketing gives each a verb, and the verbs are honest:
| Tool | Verb | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Chat | think | The conversation. You type, it answers, you push back. Where the work is the thinking. |
| Cowork | delegate | Pointed at a folder of yours through the desktop app. You hand it a task, walk away, and review the finished work. |
| Code | build | Builds working things — quizzes, trackers, small tools — from a plain-English description. No programming background required. |
| Design | create | Turns a description into visual work — flyers, slides, one-pagers. The newest of the four, and the roughest. |
Chat is the one you know, and there is no shame in living there a long time. It is where you think through how to reteach the distributive property to the student who froze last Tuesday, draft a leveled passage on the Triangle fire, or work out why your GED students keep losing points on the extended response. The conversation is the work.
Cowork is different in kind, not just degree. Through the desktop app you point it at a folder on your computer, and that folder becomes its workbench: it can read what's there, make new files, and finish multi-step jobs while you do something else. This is the tool that ends the copy-paste shuffle: no more ferrying text between a chat window and a Word document one block at a time.
Code builds things, and the pitch — "now you are a developer" — is truer than you'd expect and glibber than it should be. You describe what you want in ordinary language and it writes the actual program. But whatever it builds, you are still the teacher of record. Review its work the way you'd review a student teacher's first lesson plan: generously, and line by line.
Design is in early preview. It will draft a program flyer or a slide deck from a description, and it will also, some days, produce something you have to fix. Worth knowing about; not yet worth depending on.
ESOL: Chat drafts the dialogue and vocabulary table for Thursday. Cowork takes your folder of student writing samples and returns them sorted by level, with a note on each. Code builds a bilingual flashcard page your students open on their phones.
Computer skills: Chat plans the lesson on email etiquette. Cowork turns your term's sign-in sheets into an attendance summary. Code builds a practice form — fake fields, no stakes — where students can rehearse filling out a job application.
GED: Chat thinks through a student's persistent error pattern. Cowork assembles a week of social studies materials from your unit outline. Code builds a self-scoring practice quiz for the science modules you never have time to grade.
Only Chat exists on the free tier. Cowork, Code, and Design all require a paid plan — twenty dollars a month at the entry level — and Cowork requires the desktop app on a computer you control. For a K-12 teacher there are "educator" discount programs; for adult education teachers, there are none. The gate is not a footnote. It is the first fact of access, and your students stand on the far side of it too.
The Habits You Keep
The second layer is about repetition — teaching the tool your routines so you stop re-explaining them. Three features live here, and they work across all the products in Layer One.
Skills — a lesson plan for Claude
A skill is a folder of instructions Claude reads before starting a task. That's the whole trick. Teachers understand this in their bones: you don't reinvent your classroom routine every morning — you have a repertoire, refined over years, that you can run without thinking so your thinking goes to the students. A skill is that repertoire, written down. Get a format exactly right once — through however many rounds of back-and-forth it takes — then say package what we did as a skill. From then on, every lesson in that series comes out matching the last one.
Connectors — the plumbing to your other tools
Connectors link Claude to accounts you already use — Gmail, Google Drive, your calendar. Once connected, it can pull a document from your Drive or read your inbox instead of you pasting things in. Genuinely convenient. Also the layer that deserves your slowest, most deliberate yes.
Plugins — bundles of both
A plugin is skills and connectors packaged together around a role or tool. There's a marketplace of them. If a part of your workflow feels repetitive, someone may have bundled it already — worth a look, not worth a detour today.
ESOL: A skill that formats every workplace-English lesson the same way — dialogue, four-language vocabulary table, comprehension questions — so lesson twelve matches lesson three without you specifying a thing.
Computer skills: A skill that always writes student instructions as numbered steps, one action per step, at a plain-language reading level, with what-the-screen-shows-now checkpoints.
GED: A skill encoding your extended-response rules — two genuinely arguable passages, named sources on both sides, scored on analysis rather than side chosen — so every practice set honors them.
Before you connect an account, ask what flows through the pipe. A roster. An intake form. A student's immigration question, sitting in your program inbox. A connector doesn't know what's sensitive; you do. Connect your own personal accounts as you see fit. Connect anything holding student information only with your program's explicit blessing — and your own conscience consulted first.
The Memory It Holds
Out of the box, every conversation starts from zero. The third layer is what removes that amnesia — and it's the layer most people never set up, which is a shame, because it's where the tool stops being generic.
Projects — a classroom that remembers
A project is a folder for related conversations, with three additions that change everything: standing instructions you write once, files you upload once, and a memory that carries across every chat inside it. Make one project per class. Put your syllabus in the uploads, your standing notes in the instructions — the levels in the room, the languages spoken, the pace that works — and every conversation you open there already knows your Tuesday-night class is mostly Spanish and Darija speakers who work days and arrive tired.
Memory — it learns how you work
Alongside project memory there's account-level memory: over time, Chat picks up your preferences, your context, the way you like things done. You can view it, edit it, and delete it — and you should look at it now and then, the way you'd reread what someone has in their file about you.
The brief — for those who go further
Code and Cowork can keep a plain-text briefing file inside a working folder — the persistent instructions for that body of work. If you never touch this, you've lost nothing. If you end up running recurring work through Cowork, it's how you make the work consistent.
One project per class. One for the Tuesday ESOL cohort, one for the GED group, one for the computer skills course. Ten minutes of setup each, repaid every single session after — no more opening a new chat and typing the same three paragraphs of context you've typed forty times.
Two cautions. First: keep student names out of what the machine remembers. Describe your class in the aggregate — levels, languages, needs — not by the people in it. Second: memory is a database that updates on a schedule, not a relationship. It will make the tool feel like it knows you. Useful feeling; keep it in its place.
The Work It Does Without You
The top layer is where the sales pitch lives loudest, and where your judgment matters most. Four features, in ascending order of independence:
Computer use lets Claude operate your computer directly — opening apps, clicking, typing, filling forms — for tools that have no other way in. It's early, it makes mistakes, and it should be watched.
Dispatch lets you send a task from your phone that runs on your computer at home. On the bus after class: pull Thursday's materials together from the unit folder — and it's waiting when you get home.
Scheduled tasks run a job you've described once on a recurring clock. Every Sunday at seven: assemble the week's materials from the unit outline. Every weekday morning: summarize what came into the program inbox overnight. Here is the correction the explainer videos gloss: the work runs on Anthropic's servers, and it reaches the files in your folder only through the desktop app on your machine. If the app is closed, Claude can't touch your folder. So it is a robot in the cloud after all — with your machine as the doorway, and the files that pass through it processed at the address the companion handout gave you.
Routines (in Code) are the exception — they run on the company's servers, computer off. That's the deep end; know it exists, swim there later.
The Sunday-evening task: one scheduled job that reads your unit folder and drafts the coming week's materials for your Monday review. Not to replace your planning — to move your planning from producing to editing, which is where a teacher's judgment lives anyway.
The videos call this layer "autonomous." The better word is delegated — and delegation is a labor relation. When a machine takes over your prep, the hours don't vanish; they go somewhere. To more students on your roster, or to your own evening back — that is not decided by the software. In a union shop, where the recovered hours go is a bargaining question, and it should be bargained, not defaulted.
The Fifth Verb
The map's makers gave it four verbs: think, delegate, build, create. Useful verbs, honestly earned. But a map of tools is not a map of power, and there is a verb missing from the set.
Every layer above rests on the same arrangement: you rent. The subscription is a rent. The connectors carry your working life through infrastructure you don't govern. The skills you write, the projects you build, the routines you refine — all of it lives on terms someone else can change, at a price someone else can raise, on servers with the address the first handout gave you. Access is real, and access is not ownership. A tenant can decorate; a tenant cannot vote on the building.
This is not a reason to refuse the tools. Teachers have never had the luxury of purity about their materials — we photocopy, we borrow, we make do, we make it work for the people in the room. It is a reason to use them with your eyes open, and to carry the question the ecosystem never asks into every layer of it: who owns this, and what would it take for the people who make it valuable — the users, the workers, the teachers — to hold a share?
Think, delegate, build, create — and own. The first four are in the product. The fifth is politics, which means it's ours to do.
Pick one task you repeat every week — a lesson format, a materials packet, a report, an email you write over and over. Bring it. Not polished; just real. In the workshop we'll walk it up the layers together: think it through in Chat, teach it as a skill, house it in a project, and decide — deliberately, with the labor question on the table — whether it belongs on a schedule at all.
The four-layer map is adapted, with gratitude and a fifth verb, from an ecosystem explainer by Futurepedia. Product details verified against Anthropic's own documentation, July 2026; the corrections above are ours.
Prints clean black on white — no background fills, easy on the ink and the photocopier.