One of my goals this semester was to figure out ways to use AI as a helpful tool for teaching. As a result, my students have experimented with AI in both the Technology for STEM Educators course and the Assessment in STEM Education course.
When it
comes to lesson planning as a teacher, we need to be realistic. Teachers aren’t
going to create detailed multi-page lesson plans for each course every day. And
there will be some days that they will be stressed because they don’t have a
plan for the next class period. During
these stressful times as a teacher, I think that it would be good to use AI to
come up with a basic lesson plan. After exploring some AI tools, one of our
favorites was Gemini. It isn’t one
of the AI tools designed specifically for teachers, but it does a very good job
when given explicit directions. We used it to create a detailed lesson plan and
also discovered that it is great for creating rubrics for summative assessments,
such as projects, presentations, or other non-exam assessments.
However, it
should be noted that there are a lot of specific AI tools designed for
teachers, such as MagicSchool, Eduaide, and Brisk Teaching, which has a Chrome extension.
Since these are designed specifically for teachers, they offer a lot of tools
that could be used besides lesson plans and rubrics. These include but are not
limited to presentation makers, quiz makers, state practice tests, newsletter generators,
and letters of recommendation generators. We didn’t explore all of these tools
as we focused on lesson plans and rubrics. If you do experiment with any of
them, let me know what you think and the pros and cons of the tool.
One tool
that an alumna, Sydney Stapleton, pointed me to was Formative. She uses it a lot for creating
assessments in her classes. I created a Formative account and decided to have
it create a quiz for my Technology students on mean, median, and mode. It has a
lot of options to choose from, such as low, medium, and high difficulty or
short, medium, or long quizzes. If you want it to grade the questions, then you
would select multiple choice, true/false, or multiple selection problems. You
can also have short answer questions, but you need to grade those by hand.
After students have completed the assessment, the teacher can see a lot of
details on which problems were missed and their scores on the assessment. If
you like the questions, you can publish the quiz to a library for future use. I
was very impressed with it until I asked it to create a quiz on similar triangles
and I noticed that one of the True/False questions had the wrong answer. I was
able to fix it, but be sure that all answers are correct before using one as an
assessment in your class.
This past
week I wanted to do something different in my History of Math class. I had already
created a PowerPoint but that sounded boring so I thought it would be fun if I
could take the PowerPoint and have AI create a Kahoot.
I started exploring that option, but wasn’t sure it would work with my free
account so I went to Quizizz. After logging
in, in the middle of the page, there is a banner that says “Create with Quizizz”
and below it are various options. You can upload a file with the content and it
will create a quiz. You can even create from YouTube or a link. So I uploaded a
PDF version of my PowerPoint slides and within 5 minutes, Quizizz had created
60 multiple-choice questions covering the material on the slides. I didn’t want
that many so I deleted several until I had 36 questions. Quizizz lets you use
various ways to engage the students—they can do the questions at their own pace
during class or you could assign them as homework or you can play a game, similar
to Kahoot. I elected for the last option. At the beginning of class, I told the
students what I had done and after playing the game, we determined that 2 of
the 36 questions were not good, but the rest seemed reasonable. They all agreed
it was more fun than just going through PowerPoint slides. I suspect that I
will use this AI tool again.
One thing
that I haven’t explored with AI is to have it write questions for an exam. I
think that the best use of this tool could be creating another version of a
test with similar questions. For example, you could upload your test and then
ask it to create free-response questions. Hopefully, it would make ones of
similar difficulty, but one would have to go over them thoroughly. I think I
may encourage colleagues to try this for classes where they have to have 2 versions
of an exam.
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