Recommendations by friends and influential teachers on social media led Ballaret to try MagicSchool, a tool for K-12 educators powered by OpenAI’s text generation algorithms. He used it for tasks like creating math word problems that match his students’ interests, like Taylor Swift and Minecraft, but the real test came when he used MagicSchool this summer to outline a year’s worth of lesson plans for a new applied science and engineering class.
“Taking back my summer helped me be more refreshed for a new school year”, he says. “When I’m not spending so much time at home doing these things, I’m able to spend more time with my family and my friends and my wife so I can be my best at work, instead of being tired or rundown.”
Students’ soaring use of AI tools has gotten intense attention lately, in part due to widespread accusations of cheating. But a recent poll of 1,000 students and 500 teachers in the US by studying app Quizlet found that more teachers use generative AI than students. A Walton Family Foundation survey early this year found a similar pattern, and that about 70% of black and Latino teachers use the technology weekly. As more companies adapt generative AI to help educators, more teachers like Ballaret are experimenting with the technology to find out its strengths—and how to avoid its limitations or flaws.
Since its launch roughly 4 months ago, MagicSchool has amassed 150,000 users, founder Adeel Khan says. The service was initially offered free but a paid version that costs $9.99 monthly per teacher launches later this month. MagicSchool adapted OpenAI’s technology to help teachers by feeding language models prompts based on best practices informed by Khan’s teaching experience or popular training material. The startup’s tool can help teachers do things like create worksheets and tests, adjust the reading level of material based on a student’s needs, write individualized education programs for students with special needs, and advise teachers on how to address student behavioral problems. Competing services, including Eduaide and Diffit, are developing their own AI-powered assistants for educators.
…The AI Education Project, a nonprofit funded by companies including Google, Intel, and OpenAI, has trained more than 7,000 teachers this year in how AI works and how to use AI-powered tools in classrooms. Cofounder Alex Kotran says teachers most commonly use generative AI for lesson planning and to write emails to parents. In training sessions, he finds that many teachers have used generative AI in the past week, but few know tricks such as “prompt hacking”, which can help draw out better answers from language models. “Now that AI is available for people to use, it’s important to show—rather than tell—educators what it looks like and how it can be used effectively”, Kotran says.
…Shana White, a former teacher who leads a tech justice and ethics project at the Kapor Center, a nonprofit focused on closing equity gaps in technology, says teachers must learn not to take what AI gives them at face value. During a training session with Oakland Unified School District educators this summer, teachers using ChatGPT to make lesson plans discovered errors in its output, including text unfit for a 6th grade classroom and inaccurate translations of teaching material from English to Spanish or Vietnamese.
Due to a lack of resources and relevant teaching material, some black and Latino teachers may favor generative AI use in the classroom, says Antavis Spells, a principal in residence at a KIPP Chicago school who started using MagicSchool AI 6 weeks ago. He isn’t worried about teachers growing overly reliant on language models. He’s happy with how the tool saves him time and lets him feel more present and less preoccupied at his daughter’s sporting events, but also with how he can quickly generate content that gives students a sense of belonging.
In one instance 3 weeks ago, Spells got a text message from a parent making a collage for her son’s birthday who asked him to share a few words. With a handful of adjectives to describe him, Spells responded to the message with a custom version of the student’s favorite song, “Put On”, by Young Jeezy and Kanye West.
“I sent that to the parent and she sent me back crying emojis”, Spells says. “Just to see the joy that it brought to a family … and it probably took me less than 60 seconds to do that.” KIPP Chicago plans to begin getting feedback from parents and rolling out use of MagicSchool to more teachers in October.