Let’s Not Waste AI on Worksheets: Empower Students with Personalized Learning
In our rapidly evolving edtech landscape, the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has opened up new horizons for K-12 educators. But, according to a recent report, only 1 in 10 teachers have used AI in their classrooms. Furthermore, most teachers envision AI as a tool for creating worksheets, lesson plans, and writing prompts - essentially a teacher assistant.
That’s not entirely surprising. AI-powered lesson plan generators like Eduaide and MagicSchool.ai are generating lots of interest as teachers discover they can streamline lesson plan creation and other teaching tasks. And that’s not a bad thing, if it spurs new lesson ideas and frees teachers up to spend more time with their students.
But let's not forget, AI lesson plan generators are designed to assist teachers, not students. Students don’t interact directly with the AI. That might be helpful if your ultimate goal of AI is to protect student data, but distinctly less so if you want AI to help you personalize student learning.
Therein lies the true potential of AI, its ability to personalize education, adapting to each student's unique needs, strengths, and weaknesses in real-time. The most exciting benefit of AI lies in its ability to offer a tailored educational experience, catering to the diverse needs of our students. These tools can adjust the pace of content delivery, the depth of the subject matter, and even the teaching style, based on real-time feedback from the student. High personalization can also help ensure that lessons resonate more deeply with students, not only leading to better comprehension but also heightened engagement.
All of this potential remains untapped if AI remains solely in the hands of teachers.
So we need to educate teachers about how to leverage AI as a personalized student assistant. AI has an uncanny ability to process vast amounts of data, identify patterns, and provide insights that might elude human understanding. It can design optimal learning strategies and provide personalized recommendations — if it has access to student work and thinking.
Fortunately, there are valuable tools and strategies available to assist teachers and schools in creating personalized learning environments. Intelligent tutoring systems and adaptive learning systems, such as Khanmigo and others, can emulate one-on-one tutoring by offering guidance and feedback while adjusting educational content in real time based on a student's performance. They’re not perfect, but AI personalized tutors are tantalizingly close to the ability to help students step-by-step — solving a problem, or understanding a concept — without quickly “giving up the answer” to students.
ChatGPT’s new voice feature, in particular, holds immense potential for augmenting personalized education and interactive learning. Instead of relying on textbooks, handouts or instructional videos, students now have the ability to engage in exploratory dialogues about curriculum content with an AI guide.
Consider that Khanmigo and other AI personalized systems are built upon ChatGPT's technical foundation — GPT. Expect other chatbots to offer a voice feature that addresses learners’ questions and provides detailed verbal explanations. Moreover, expect that these chatbots will be able to role-play to spur understanding, initiate in-depth discussions with students, and change their instructional methods based on the learner's responses.
The future is bright, but there are definitely lots of hurdles to overcome: digital equity, misinformation, cheating — to name a few. A crucial step forward is guiding educators to see AI as an immediate aide to students.
The advent of novel technologies in the educational sphere has typically been greeted with apprehension and a teacher-centric focus. The challenge ahead orienting educators towards harnessing the analytical strength and customization potential of AI technologies.
