Magic School AI

AI has become huge recently! It seems like just yesterday people joked about robots taking over the world and taking over jobs and now it seems not so mich like a joke. There are so many things AI can do that can be really dangerous or bad but there is also lots of benefits to AI. One of benefits of AI I hvae been hearing about are AI tools that help teachers create lesson plans, ideas, or activities and this seems awesome to me because it is impossible to completely reinvent the wheel for every assignment and planning hundreds of thousands of activities but these can help create engaging activities that are different and easy to plan in a hurry.

One of the tools I kept hearing people talk about is this Magic School AI and thought Iwould give it a try. I had seen it used in one of the class rooms I EA’d in and was super intrigued but didnt have a chance to ask questions about it and kind of forgot about it until I watched the Alex Curos presentation and discussed AI today. One of the things I immediately noticed about Magic School was how many differnt things it can do! On the sidebar, there are the main categories of tools available but then in each category there is so much more to explore!

I started my exploration by looking at all the differnt Magic Tools. On this page I found 7 heading categories:

• • • • • Planning
        • Content
        • Questions
        • Intellectual Prep
        • Student Support
        • Communications
        • Community Tools.

When I looked at these categories deeper the possibilities seemed endless! You could generate an Email to familes, create worksheets, generate report card comments, create multiple choice assessments or rubrics, create a lesson plan, proofread texts, generate a song, or ask for teacher jokes! All of these with just a few clicks of a button. The way it works, is you click what you want to create – for the demonstration I am generating a joke because who doesn’t love jokes?? So once you select your tool, you choose a grade level, I chose grade 3, and give it a topic – I said make it about healthy foods to match the USC3.1 Outcome in the Sask curriculum, and just like that! It generates your jokes. So here ya go- why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing! LOL!! Once you get your joke or whatever it is you ask for you can give it new information to regenerate the content if you are unimpressed.

Now, some people may ask, how this tool improves teaching and I probably didn’t pick the best Magic tool to demonstrate enhanced teaching. But being able to use Magic School AI to create new lesson plans, or using the worksheet or activities you are bringing in new activities into your classroom, and anytime you do something new students will be excited and therefor engaged. There is also a whole Youtube channel of ideas, tutorials, and suggestions of how to use AI and Magic School Specifically.

Another excellent feature of Magic School is some of the Student Support tools. Working as an EA I see all the time and energy that teachers put in to ensuring all there students have the support they need and are able to succeed in their own ways. Using Magic School AI you could create Behaviour Intervention Plans, Individualized Education Programs, or texts levelers that make any text a specific reading level. These tools can all be used to enhacne the experience for students who may need some extra help in the classroom. I know there is support staff in some schools who specialize in doing these things, but as we are seeing in the teacher strikes right now, we need more support and being able to use tools like this to be able to help a bit more is super important and special! Now having said that, I don’t think teachers should purely depend on AI generated resources all the time because it isn’t always completely reliable and sometimes lacks the creativity and human aspects because after all it is just a computer! However, sometimes the extra help is more than acceptable and a great place to start for ideas or a baseline to build on and add onto after you have the general idea.