Hi everyone!
I chose to explore the AI tool Magic School. I have played around with various features and plan to share my thoughts with you today in this post!
What is Magic School?
Magic School AI is a platform that provides tools to help teachers and students with various tasks, such as content creation, assessment, unit planning, lesson planning, and more.
How could this tool enhance teaching? Could it aid in personalized learning, automate administrative tasks, or provide new ways of engaging students?
Honestly, the main purpose of Magic School AI is to help teachers save time. Teachers need to do a lot of planning, especially if they want to create engaging student activities and assignments. Using a platform like Magic School to assist in unit and lesson planning will save teachers a lot of excess energy, allowing them to focus on tailoring the results to their specific students’ learning needs instead. Magic School has features that prompt you to tailor the results to your specific goal. I will attach a screenshot of what it looks like when you click on the lesson plan feature below. I am unsure why the image appears blurry, but I think you will get the gist. It asks for grade level, topic or objective, additional criteria, and standard set to align to (the SK curriculum).
How might this tool support different learning styles, assess student understanding, or encourage critical thinking and creativity?
Magic School prompts you to enter your desired criteria, which means that you can ultimately create resources or activities tailored to different learning styles without having to spend the time physically making them yourself. You could add that to your description if you wanted to assess student understanding or encourage critical thinking and creativity.
What are some of the ethical or practical challenges of using this tool?
I think as educators, it is important for us to remember that as helpful as AI tools are, they do not know our students and their unique needs. We should not rely solely on AI to do our planning without using professional judgment and modifying it to match our classroom or students. It is meant to be a tool, not to do our jobs for us. During my internship, the principal encouraged us to use AI to help assist in planning. He told us, “Why reinvent the wheel.” There are so many great resources and tools to help make our jobs easier, so why not use them? This way, our energy can be put into other aspects of our jobs, like building relationships. However, he also said that if AI is used to help assist, it should not be your only copy. It then needs to be modified and tailored to the specific students in your class.
To sum up, Do I think Magic School AI is really magic to schools?
Well, yes, and no. I personally am so grateful to have a resource like Magic School. I value student engagement; sometimes, I can spend hours simply brainstorming engaging activities. That is a lot of time dedicated solely to brainstorming. Magic School helps generate ideas I can choose to use or not use. It is a great tool to help assist in planning and can be individualized. I also like to use the parent communication feature, as it helps word emails and articulate my thoughts more clearly. With resources like this, I feel like I can invest my energy more into building relationships and classroom management.