Amanda Pierman has found many ways to use AI technology in her work at The Benjamin School in North Palm Beach, Fla, giving her more brainpower and brain space, according to an article in Education Week.
Pierman now uses ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools, like Brisk Teaching, Quizizz and EdPuzzle, to generate quiz and test questions.
With the help of generative AI tools, crafting an exam now takes 40 minutes. She can put the exam topics into the tool and prompt it to generate multiple-choice questions and even ask it to mix up the questions so students have different versions.
AI tools have also helped her grade multiple-choice questions, including short-answer ones, Pierman says. For short-answer questions, the AI-generated feedback is a starting point for Pierman, and then she adds her own “glows and grows,” or what students did well and what they need to improve.
With AI taking those tasks off her plate, “I don’t get burnt out as much,” she says.
The science teacher uses Merlyn Mind, an AI-powered voice assistant that allows her to control her computer screen while moving around the room to interact with students.
Joe Ackerman, a 5th grade teacher at Mead Elementary in Mead, Colo., uses generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to refine and expedite his communication with staff members and families, produce design-thinking lessons for students, and help grade student work.
“It has helped me free up my time [that I can] then devote to teaching,” Ackerman says. “I’m spending less time crafting emails, I’m spending less time on administrative tasks, and it also helps me provide more feedback on a more frequent basis.”
He lists the items he wants to include in the weekly newsletter, and ChatGPT generates it for him. After Ackerman makes a couple tweaks, such as changing the tone so it’s more friendly, the newsletter is ready to send to parents and guardians.
Ackerman also uses AI tools to build design-thinking lessons, where students work together to devise creative ways to solve a problem ChatGPT can create a lesson in which students design and prototype an innovation to help the main character in a novel feel less lonely. The students came up with an app to connect the main character with friends, a robot companion, and an interactive journal.
“It’s a way for [students] to connect with the text and collaborate with each other,” he says.
Yana Garbarg, an English teacher at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria, an all-girls public secondary school in the Queens borough of New York, started playing around with generative AI tools and found the technology “a helpful timesaver,” she says.
As an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition teacher, Garbarg started experimenting with using AI tools to expedite the work of providing personalized feedback for students’ writing.
Now, Garbarg reads all her students’ essays to get an overall sense of their “glows and grows.” Students’ writing then goes into a generative AI tool—in this case, MagicSchool.AI—and instructs it to write feedback based on a set of criteria and her thoughts.
For example, she’ll tell it to “shout them out for their very clear and organized topic sentences and their use of transitional phrases,” and then she’ll ask the tool to pull out examples from their writing to show where they’re doing a good job. If she’s pointing out a skill that a student needs to work on, such as writing a clearer thesis, Garbarg will ask the tool to give the student an example or a better version using their own words.
AI has made her feedback become “more like a narrative” for her students, which is better than “some ugly red markings” on their papers, Garbarg says. The technology has also made her feedback more timely and more comprehensive.
Students are better able to look back at feedback from previous writing assignments and see how their writing is improving and what skills they need to focus on, Garbarg says.
These veteran educators say they encourage teachers who are hesitant to use AI to play around with different tools.
“The more you play with it, the more you’ll be able to see its capabilities,” says Ackerman. “The more teachers do that, the more they’ll recognize that it’s not something that’s going to replace people. It’s not something that’s going to stop students from learning or stop the need for teachers. It’s just going to be another tool.”
They recommend starting small and providing the generative AI tool with very specific parameters so the output is more useful.
“AI is really exciting,” Pierman says. “And yet, we have to teach how to use it responsibly.”
Education Week
