AI options

Top Tips for using AI in your classroom

Here are 5 tips to think about before bringing AI into your classroom. 


If you are excited/interested in a tool and think it would enhance your teaching, begin with looking at how you would use it and hone your skills before sharing it with students.


Once you are comfortable with it, start small with simple simple tasks, test it out, is it doing what you need?


Augmentation not replacement

Recognise that not all AI tools are useful in every educational setting. Check in with the curriculum skills and knowledge. Is the technology used allowing you or your students to learn skills or is it doing the learning for you or them? 


Points to consider are validity of the tool and are there any restriction such as age, ie Perplexity which is for 13 years old.


Sit with your class or group and model how to write prompts, check sources and read for information.


Articles

Commonsense Media: How to handle AI in schools

ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education

Singapore Education



Perplexity

Use Perplexity to help with your research skills.  It's great as it can help you check your sources. 

Magic School

Magic School is an AI tool for teachers. It can be found at magicschool.ai

Check out all the Magic tools you can use from reporting, writing emails and creating choice boards. 

Magic School are now running PD programs and you can find the details here: Magic School PD Resources

Canva magic design studio has lots of different parts to it. You can find the list and summary of what  each category does to enhance your presentations below.  I have added a little review of how useful I have found it for teaching.  I have put the ones I have found most useful (so far) at the top. 

Magic Studio: Designing for presentations

Teaching Review: I found it most useful for UOS lessons. The Magic Studio beta examples are always very formulaic and not useful for our context. If you look to the templates further down you can often find more user friendly versions.

Magic Media: Creating Videos or photos from text

Teaching review: useful when looking for very specific images have not used the video function. 

Magic Write: AI writing tool

Teaching review: Found it less useful than writing my own titles and captions probably because we don't use much text on our slides and feel I know the tone of what I want to say. Although this short video from canva makes it look a lot better! 

Magic Design:  Designing infographics for social posts.  

Teaching review:  Not useful only comes up with short bit sizes pieces of information.

Magic switch: Change your design into other formats. Translates your designs into other languages.

Teaching review: Useful if you need to turn a presentation into a doc and the translations feature could be helpful for meet the teacher nights, for example.

Magic design for video: Creating Short videos

Teaching Review: Not used

Magic Animate: Add animation to slides

Teaching Review: Not used 

Magic Morph: Enhances text by changing shapes and graphics.

Teaching Review: Not used 



A website that uses specific bots to chat to you so the results can be more tailored to your specific situation. They also have a host of technical support specialists such canva and seesaw that you could reach out to if there is a problem instead of their help pages and waiting for responses. They also have different learning support specialists so you can ask for specific prompts, guides and resources to help your learners. 

I asked Chatgpt to summarize its benefits for teachers. This is what it came up with:


I next asked it to give pointers on how to write good prompts. Here are chatgpt's tips.


This is where you can create UFLI decodable texts. When you register it is free but you need to invite 3 more people to join.  

Padlet

Padlet has a new AI function. Please go to check it out. It can design a board for you. Below is an example of how to find the AI tools. 1 example is for the Grade 1 unit and 1 example is creating a vocabulary board.

g1padletexample.mov

Grade 1: Systems

Creating vocabulary boards.mov

Grade 4 vocabulary board: In the mix

Tim shared with us Diffit an AI tool that can generate resources such as slides,  worksheets, research taking notes, vocabulary work and creates google forms. It also has a language feature if you need to make a resource more accessible. This video has a good summary of what it does. 

Diffit.mp4

If you are interested and want to explore the first 4 people to click on this link will have the premium service available to them until March 5th.