Files and Documents
TeamTeacher gives your work two homes: Documents and Files. They sound similar, but they do different jobs — and knowing which is which will save you time.
The short version: a Document is something you keep working on and refine with your agents. A File is a finished artifact you upload, import, or have an agent create. Both live in your library, both can be pulled into a conversation, and both stay private to you.
Documents — editable and AI-native
Documents are TeamTeacher's own editable content, the way Google Docs are native to Google Workspace — except ours are built for working with AI from the ground up, and theirs are anything but. They come in two kinds:
- Rich text — a Markdown-based, AI-optimized format. You still get the formatting you expect (headings, lists, tables, links), but the underlying format stays lightweight and clean, so agents can read it cheaply and edit it precisely instead of wading through layout noise.
- Spreadsheets — rows, columns, and sheets, for the trackers, grade sheets, and planning grids that don't belong in prose.
The thing that makes a Document a Document is that both you and your agents can edit it. Ask an agent to draft a rubric and it creates a new document; ask it to tighten the second section and it revises that section in place; ask it to fill in a column of scores and it updates just those cells — and you watch the change land in the live viewer beside the chat.
The agent tools you'll see at work on documents: Search Documents (find one by title or by meaning), Get Document (open it), Save Document (create a new one), Edit Document (revise rich text), and Read Cells / Update Cells (read and change spreadsheet cells).
Files — everything you upload, import, or create
Files are your raw files — the kind that would sit on your computer's desktop. PDFs, images, slide decks, and anything you upload, import, or ask an agent to generate all land here.
When enabled (a subscriber feature), TeamTeacher adds AI optimization to your files behind the scenes — starting with parsing PDFs into a clean, AI-ready text format so you and your agents can actually work with what's inside them, with more file types and enhancements on the way. In practice that's the difference between an agent saying "I can't read this PDF" and it summarizing your 30-page unit plan.
Unlike documents, files aren't edited in place. An agent can read a file and create a new file from it — a converted copy, a revised draft, a generated handout — and your original stays exactly as you left it. The tools here are Get File (read a file's contents) and Create File (generate a new PDF, Word document, slide deck, or spreadsheet file).
When you do want to start editing an uploaded file, turn it into a Document from the file's page — and you're back in editable, AI-native territory.
Which one should I reach for?
- Make it a Document when it's something you'll keep refining with your agents — a lesson plan, a rubric, a unit tracker.
- Keep it a File when it's a finished artifact you mainly need to store, reference, or hand off — a syllabus PDF, a scanned form, a deck you generated.
Private by default, and built to stay lean
Your files live in private storage, not out on the open web. When one needs to be shown or downloaded, TeamTeacher hands out a short-lived signed link — and row-level security means only you can generate links to your own files. Those links expire on their own and are re-issued as needed, so nothing is public by default and old links don't linger.
It's efficient, too. TeamTeacher stores each file once and references it by link, rather than stuffing images into every document as bloated base64 blobs the way some tools do — so your documents stay small and quick to load, for you and for your agents.