How AI helps Colorado instructors do more teaching: "What this does, in essence, is accesses excellent high-level information"
Teacher Zach Kennelly is teaching his students using his newest tool. Magicschool.ai. It's an online program that uses artificial intelligence to help teachers and their students.
"What this does, in essence, is accesses excellent high-level information, increases ease of intellectual prep for me, ease of getting it to the student, and then I can make it so relevant," Kennelly said.
He takes a topic, punches it into an AI bot, sets the learning level and it spits out an explanation. He can then have his students read it to learn the lesson and build off of that base knowledge.
"We're collaborating as a community to really use this tool to make everybody more effective over time," Kennelly said.
Adeel Khan is a former Colorado teacher and principal, and the creator of magicshool.ai. He says the goal is for teachers to have a virtual assistant to help them do the things that take up the most time and prevent them from teaching.
"It democratizes knowledge," Khan said. "They (teachers) can go to this platform and say, 'oh I can use it for drafting a letter to a family. I can use it for leveling a text for a student who's behind in grade level. I can use it for generating questions associated with a text.' So, there are all these use cases that are right there for a teacher to use."
That way teachers can be more effective and students can learn more. Recent high school graduate, Melissa Brito-Nuñez, says it really helped her with her project on affordable healthcare.
"Instead of spending a lot of time researching, I utilized that to actually lay out the plan and carry it out," she said.
But, she warns her fellow students this is tool to help not to cheat.
"Take everything AI says with a grain of salt to not hinder your own critical thinking," Brito-Nuñez expressed.
Zach Kennelly says this is just the beginning for AI and getting students used to using it is setting them up to succeed.
"The people who are going to be the most successful are the ones who collaborate with AI," Kennelly said.
Magicschool.ai is free to use.
