The Work of a Teacher is A Changin' 🎵
Teachers are really busy people. AI tools can help to pick up the slack.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." Alvin Toeffler
This is one of my favourite quotes ever. And it is oh so true of and for teachers, even though those of us who have been at it for a longer time sometimes observe a bit of resistance when it comes to accepting new technologies. :)
At my first (of surely very many) presentations on AI this year, to a group of 50 educators here in Vienna, Austria, I talked about a few AI tools and how they are already changing the habits of teachers around the world.
I started by pointing out that we, as working humans, already offload many tasks and do not necessarily retain all the information we need to do our jobs in our heads at all times (think phone numbers, codes, or passwords). Christian Spannagel recently mentioned two concepts in one of his talks on AI and education that really stuck with me, “computational offloading” and “distributed cognition”, which describe how we offload tasks to automated assistants, either in an analog way or digitally. So, we are already comfortable with certain aids that help us do our jobs.
So, now that we have the promise of teaching assistants, what kind of jobs can AI help us with? As per my particular context, I showed how I recently used AI tools to
Analyse a worksheet to ask for solutions
translate words from a chart I had made
create 4 images for a story-building activity in class
write out the hard-to-read writing of a student
I then proceeded to demo a few key tools that are currently available for teachers and show how I believe certain processes will be automated by us in the future: lesson planning, brainstorming ideas for activities, image generation for materials, translation and summarization, analysing PDFs or gaining key facts from transcripts, and of course to generate all kinds of texts.
The tools I featured can be viewed on a Padlet page I created here.
https://padlet.com/aliciabankhofer/aitoolsteachers
Please feel free to use and reuse.
What other changes are in store for us, and how will AI technology transform our processes? I’m curious to find out.
What tools would YOU recommend to educators starting on their AI journey?
Let me know what would be on YOUR list.
Tool: Adobe Firefly (beta)
Prompt: “brown skinned female teachers showing students the way forward, in a room full of black and white devices, gadgets, technology, robots - comic style”