ithin the last three decades in education, nothing has taken off as quickly among educators as AI and its various chatbots. All over the world, educators are already leveraging it to free up time and improve their practice. Such a transformation would allow teachers to focus on relationship building and coaching students, identify real world applications, and personalize feedback and instruction. For decades, educators and others have lamented the stubbornness of education systems that don’t evolve with the times, but the recent uptake of these tools is showing that teachers are ready to innovate and rethink how they work.
For example, Schoolinka allows educators in Nigeria to use AI to diagnose and address student literacy levels; Playlab enables teachers to create applications that provide students with feedback on their college essays and generate hands-on activities to meet different science standards. Teach FX allows teachers to record lessons and receive instructional feedback, and Polymath AI helps tens of thousands of teachers around the world develop lesson plans, assignments, and assessments.
This technology also has the potential to be a tremendous force for equity as it enables education in remote and under-resourced places, helps the less experienced teachers save time and improve their practice, and provides students with out-of-school support currently affordable only by the most privileged.
However, there are massive challenges to reaching these ends, especially given that many of the world’s students still don’t have connectivity. If left up to the private industry—which incentivizes revenue growth and profit alone—AI use will spread without the concern of becoming a force for equity and transformation.
Realizing these ends requires centering the leadership of teachers in marginalized communities who are on a mission to shape a better future for students by preparing them to navigate today’s world. There’s a need to ensure that these teachers have access to the connectivity, hardware, software, and support that will allow them to experiment with and leverage AI. We need to foster a global learning community among educators to surface and spread insights about what’s working and what’s not. And finally, there’s a need to support teachers to found, lead, and join the teams of these ventures in order to drive the ed tech and AI spaces.
AI could be the tool that facilitates teachers to drive educational equity and transformation worldwide.
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With AI, Teachers Can Finally Revolutionize Education
Image via Adobe Stock.
January 12, 2024
AI has been the biggest disruptor for education in three decades. Educators are already using generative AI to help free up their time, but there’s even more ways AI can empower, rather than replace, educators, writes Teach For All’s Wendy Kopp.
W
ithin the last three decades in education, nothing has taken off as quickly among educators as AI and its various chatbots. All over the world, educators are already leveraging it to free up time and improve their practice. Such a transformation would allow teachers to focus on relationship building and coaching students, identify real world applications, and personalize feedback and instruction. For decades, educators and others have lamented the stubbornness of education systems that don’t evolve with the times, but the recent uptake of these tools is showing that teachers are ready to innovate and rethink how they work.
For example, Schoolinka allows educators in Nigeria to use AI to diagnose and address student literacy levels; Playlab enables teachers to create applications that provide students with feedback on their college essays and generate hands-on activities to meet different science standards. Teach FX allows teachers to record lessons and receive instructional feedback, and Polymath AI helps tens of thousands of teachers around the world develop lesson plans, assignments, and assessments.
This technology also has the potential to be a tremendous force for equity as it enables education in remote and under-resourced places, helps the less experienced teachers save time and improve their practice, and provides students with out-of-school support currently affordable only by the most privileged.
However, there are massive challenges to reaching these ends, especially given that many of the world’s students still don’t have connectivity. If left up to the private industry—which incentivizes revenue growth and profit alone—AI use will spread without the concern of becoming a force for equity and transformation.
Realizing these ends requires centering the leadership of teachers in marginalized communities who are on a mission to shape a better future for students by preparing them to navigate today’s world. There’s a need to ensure that these teachers have access to the connectivity, hardware, software, and support that will allow them to experiment with and leverage AI. We need to foster a global learning community among educators to surface and spread insights about what’s working and what’s not. And finally, there’s a need to support teachers to found, lead, and join the teams of these ventures in order to drive the ed tech and AI spaces.
AI could be the tool that facilitates teachers to drive educational equity and transformation worldwide.
