Over the past five years, I’ve explored ways to integrate AI into my teaching practice—even before ChatGPT and other generative AI became some of the most talked-about topics in education. Every educator needs to learn about AI and how we can leverage this technology to benefit our students and enhance our own work. To best provide for our students, we need to understand how this technology will impact them and us. What better way than to explore new tools via AI in our teaching practice?
Why Educators Need to Understand AI Tools
Our roles as educators have continued to change over the years. With technology comes a bit of hesitancy, especially with something as powerful as AI. In our schools, we have to provide opportunities for students to learn about changing technology because of the impact it may have on their future. Not only can AI tools enhance creativity and productivity, but also they can provide educators with valuable insights into student learning and assist with some of the time-consuming tasks that educators have.
Even with all of the promises of AI, it is important that we take time to talk about artificial intelligence in our classrooms. Not only do we teach the content, but we serve as mentors, facilitators of learning and co-learners with our students, especially as we embrace these emerging powerful technologies. It’s important that we help our students learn about the benefits of them and also show how to use these tools properly, responsibly, and ethically.
How AI Can Improve A Teacher’s Job
Personalized learning: Educators can provide tailored learning experiences based on AI-driven analytics that provide valuable insights into student performance and learning trends. Using this data, AI can instantly adapt student learning materials. Teachers can then use this information to provide personalized learning experiences, adapting to each student’s strengths, weaknesses, and learning pace.
Productivity and efficiency: Greater efficiency comes with AI as well. Educators are responsible for a variety of clerical tasks, such as communicating with students and their families, grading assessments, and providing feedback. Educators may find they spend more time on these clerical tasks rather than on teaching and working directly with students. The right AI tools can help to automate or streamline these tasks, which allows teachers to have additional time with their students.
Creating and supplementing content: Through AI-powered platforms, teachers can curate a range of educational resources. With generative AI in particular, teachers are able to create lessons, activities, assessments, prompts for discussion, and presentations simply by providing a short prompt with keywords.
7 education Tools that work
Here are seven AI-powered tools that will help teachers with personalized learning that enables them to become more efficient and save time that can then be spent with students. I have used each of these for my own personal writing and creating of presentations, and the amount of time they save by generating the slides alone helps me to focus more closely on the content. I also appreciate that the tools offer translation options and a variety of templates and other resources that are commonly used by educators.
1. AudioPen: For years, I have been using voice-to-text to write blogs, books, emails, and lesson plans. This is an AI-powered web app that you can use on your computer or phone. The app takes your words and enhances them as it generates the text, which you can edit as needed.
2. Canva Magic Write: Canva now offers an AI text-to-image generator called Magic Write, which can inspire creativity in writing. It provides ideas, helps with brainstorming, and supports lesson planning, making it a useful tool for educators for creating a presentation or other graphic for classroom use. Magic Write can assist with many writing tasks that educators may have by analyzing the word prompts and then helping with brainstorming, creating an outline, writing lesson plans, or generating a visually engaging presentation in far less time.
3. Curipod: This website enables teachers to create interactive lessons in minutes using AI. Students can explore various topics, and the AI functionality helps generate customized lessons tailored to their learning needs. Teachers simply type in a topic, and a ready-to-run lesson is generated with text, images, and activities such as polls, open-ended responses, word clouds, and more. There are even activities to build in that focus on SEL check-ins.
4. Eduaide.Ai: This is an AI-assisted lesson-development tool that provides educators with more than 100 resource types to choose from to create high-quality instructional materials. It offers the ability to translate the generated content into more than 15 languages instantly. Educators can generate a syllabus, create discussion prompts, use the “teaching assistant” for help with creating individualized education program plans, write emails, or even compile a list of accommodations for students. Eduaide.AI has a content generator, teaching assistant, feedback bot, free-form chat, and assessment builder.
5. OpenAI: The recently released Teaching with AI guide for teachers was created to help educators use ChatGPT in their classroom. The guide comes with several suggested prompts and includes explanations that clarify exactly how ChatGPT works and what its limitations are, and it provides reminders of the importance of verifying information and checking for bias. With ChatGPT 4, which is a paid version, there is greater accuracy and reliability of information than with the original version.
6. Quizizz: With Quizizz, teachers can design quizzes that will create a personalized learning path based on each student’s responses. Teachers can also create lessons with Quizizz, which now has an AI enhancement that can adjust question difficulty, check grammar, and redesign questions to reflect real-world scenarios, with more features on the way.
7. Slidesgo: This tool provides access to free templates via Google Slides and now has the AI Presentation Maker. With this new functionality, presentations can be created within minutes. Simply choose a topic; select a tone such as casual, creative, or professional; make changes; and download your presentation. A time-saver for sure!
Creating and sharing these resources with our students leads to rich conversations about the benefits of AI and proper use of this technology for creating and learning. There are many more tools available for teachers to explore that can help with each of the key areas that I mentioned. Most important is selecting a tool to start with and reflecting on how it impacted your practice.
