Using AI As An Educator

I believe that AI has so many benefits for teachers. It can be so easy to run out of lesson ideas or need to add supplementary work to add in to a pre-existing lesson. We do not always have the amount of time that we would like to have, so using AI tools to help in the process can be so helpful. When there is only so much time in the day, and especially when there is limited time during actual work hours, getting a bit of a boost from an online tool can be so helpful. It is easy to wonder if AI tools can do pieces of our jobs for us, why are we still relevant as teachers. But I think it is incredibly important to note that AI is not doing our job for use, it is simply assisting us in order to allow us to give the best education we possibly can. The article Teachers and AI: Balancing Technology and The Human Touch, Dipesh Jain discusses why these tools are so important to make our teaching better, not just simply allow us to do less work. I have outlined some of the ideas discussed that I feel are very relevant to why learning to use AI is important as teachers.

1. AI Can Help Handle Some Extra Tasks: These tasks can be things like creating quizzes or homework assignments. I can see this helping with mathematics. It can be difficult to come up with all of the word problems needed for student practice, and AI not only can create these problems, but also tailor them to what the students have actually learned.
2. Helps to Provide Differentiated Instruction: In a classroom with a multitude of needs, we are not always able to plan for the individual, but rather the class as a whole. This can result in some students being left behind while others are not working to their full potential. When we are able to input our lesson into an AI tool, we can ask for adaptations that might work for a variety of students.

AI For Lesson Planning

For this post I decided to look into MagicSchool.ai because it has lots of really good options specifically made for teachers. On this website you can access lesson plan generators, worksheet generators, report card comments, YouTube video comments, grading rubrics, and so many other great tools. When looking through all of the options, I decided to try writing a lesson plan. I chose this because I sometimes do not have ideas that come immediately when looking at an outcome. So, using a lesson planning tool like this could be really helpful with getting the ideas flowing.

I took a screen recording with a voiceover while I was trying out this tool, you can check it out below!

I really liked using this tool. I liked at the beginning that I could put in my outcome/goals for the lesson as well as any additional learning that I wanted to accomplish. In the lesson plan itself I was given ways to open the lesson, teach the content, allow for practice time, assess, extend the learning, and watch out for common misconceptions. I really like how many things I was given. I think this lesson plan is a really good starting point, but I would still need to adjust some of the points to work for the group of students I would be with. However, in terms of a general plan that can easily be adapted I think this is really great.

How Is This Tool Useful For Students?

As we have discussed AI is a really great tool to look into for teachers, but I think it could be super helpful for students as well. MagicSchool.ai could work well for studying for tests, as it has the option to write quizzes. I think a student could input the information they learned in class and then take the practice quiz. Students could also use AI to re-explain a topic they are not fully understanding, as sometimes we just need to hear it in different terms.

Overall I think this is a really useful tool for both students and teachers, and I would definitely recommend checking it out!