Classroom Context

Unit title: Guess who!

Target group: 3rd formers (8 and 9 year-olds)

Language level: Pre-A1

Group description: These students attend a private school in Villa Devoto, CABA. They are used to working online and using Google Classroom to hand in homework. Most classrooms are equipped with a TV or overhead projector, allowing the use of presentations, audio, and visual materials during lessons. The school also has got an ICT room and several notebooks that can be brought into the classroom. Students have five periods of English per week.

Changes implemented: The lesson plan was originally designed for a group of 3rd form students at a public school in Caballito. Since the technology available in that classroom was quite limited, we decided to change the target group of students, as well as the final task, to meet the requirements of the assignment. The use of AI tools also made it possible to shorten the original lessons and combine the two parts of the final task into one. 

Benefits of including AI tools in the classroom: Integrating AI tools allows students to participate in multimodal, creative tasks that combine text, visuals and audio in ways traditional methods can not.

For instance, Canva’s AI  text-to -image tool enables students to transform textual character descriptions into visual images, helping them refine language accuracy, descriptive skills, and visual literacy, while also teaching them to evaluate AI limitations, as AI may generate characters with unprompted features. Voicemod encourages experimentation with voice and musical style, allowing students to produce songs, which in turn boosts engagement, motivation and expressive skills in language learning. Khanmigo supports the generation of poems or song lyrics from student input, which in turn fosters critical thinking, creativity, and reflection, while allowing students to see how AI can extend and co-create content. 

These tools also help develop digital literacy, as students must critically assess AI outputs and they reflect on how technology influences communication. Using AI also saves time on repetitive tasks, enabling teachers to instead fully focus on guided feedback and collaborative discussion, and it supports differentiated learning, since outputs can reflect each group’s ideas, style, and language level.

Final task Part 1 (30 min)

Next, the teacher reads the instructions for the second activity. She explains that students will carry out two tasks simultaneously: half of the group will create the image using CanvaAI, while the other half will work on the song using Voicemod. Before they begin, the teacher demonstrates how to use both tools. When presenting CanvaAI, she emphasizes the importance of selecting the image that best matches the students’ written description, as AI tools may generate inaccurate or unexpected results. The teacher uses the images generated to show students how some of the pictures don’t comply with the given instructions (e.g.: eye colour) and to raise awareness of AI’s limitations and the need to critically evaluate automatically generated content.

Voicemod was selected as a tool to allow students to generate songs containing descriptions of their characters, using AI-assisted voice modulation. Traditionally, oral presentations in the classroom rely on students’ own voices and live performance, which can limit experimentation and engagement, especially for learners who feel self-conscious or lack confidence in speaking. By integrating Voicemod, the task is modified (SAMR: modification), as students can manipulate pitch, tone, and style, producing varied auditory outputs that still reflect their creative intentions. It also redefines the activity completely, as originally students had to ask themselves and answer about the characters' visual traits, while now they can produce in a matter of minutes a song with the description of their character for others to listen and guess. This tool also encourages students to engage in higher-order thinking according to Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (2016): they compose an audio representation of their character, inspect whether the AI-generated voice conveys the intended personality traits or emotions, and verify which version communicates their ideas most effectively. Through this process, Voicemod enhances student engagement and promotes creativity, showing how AI can be used to expand the possibilities of traditional oral tasks in the language classroom. 

Khanmigo was incorporated to facilitate the final reflective task, enabling students to co-create poems or summaries of the lesson/unit with AI assistance. The original task involved sharing orally one thing they have learned in the lesson. Using Khanmigo redefines the reflection process, as students collaborate with AI to generate, refine, and expand ideas, producing a poem that combines their own input with AI suggestions. This task engages students in Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy (2016) higher-order skills: they create content collaboratively, inspect AI-generated suggestions for coherence (analyse) and evaluate the final text to ensure it accurately represents their experiences and insights. Furthermore, the activity promotes digital literacy by requiring students to critically assess the output. Khanmigo enhances metacognitive reflection, creativity, and analytical thinking.