AI is making quite an impact in education all around the world. From Spain to Japan, AI-enabled tools are getting more popular among students and educators thanks to extraordinary abilities. Here’s a scenario to show some of them.
Why does a heated aluminum collapse when it’s rapidly cooled?
This is a question given to a classroom full of four graders. Instead of going to traditional textbooks in the search for answers, they need to conduct experiments. One, for example, involves heating and cooling a bottle of milk with an attached balloon.
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Unsurprisingly, every student is excited and ready to learn, as natural curiosity drives than towards finding an answer.
The task ends with students discussing their findings in groups, and since the teacher cannot possibly monitor all conversations, they use AI-enabled technology that:
- Records discussions and catches the keywords indicating a degree of understanding
- Transcribes the conversations so the educator could see how the groups managed to arrive at conclusions
- Provide output by students so the educator could assess the results and refine the lesson plan.
This is how IBM Watson Speech to Text technology changes education in Japan right now. It’s just one example of AI-powered technology making a difference for young people’s future, and the use cases are really exciting.
In this article, let’s see how AI besides its application in business can also assist students in schools all over the world to achieve better outcomes and build a better world.
1. Assessment of Student Performance with Real-Time Speech Recognition
Continuing the example given in the intro, AI-powered technology like IBM’s Watson Speech to Text is already making a difference in classrooms. Given that a teacher cannot always monitor all student conversations and assist them, some kind of technology can be designed to tackle this.
IBM Watson computer. Credit: Time
Thankfully, the technology to overcome this challenge already exists. By recording human conversations and analyzing them with AI-enabled algorithms, Watson can help to improve student-centricity.
Here’s how it works:
- An educator provides Watson with keywords and other outcomes they expect to arise during a lesson or exercise
- The tool records and transcribes the conversations by students
- An educator analyzes Watson’s output and evaluates the performance of each student
- The feedback is used to improve future lessons.
2. Improving Learning Personalization
The ultimate purpose here is to provide more relevant learning opportunities to support students during lessons. This is done by AI software collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data to create a student learning profile. Educators could use this profile to design individualized exercises and even lessons to support a student’s learning style and preferences.
In other words, Ai can help to adjust content by performance and preferences of students. For Cheyenne Williams, an educational researcher at Trust My Paper and BestEssayEducation, the ability of an AI-enabled system to help educators heavily relies on the strength of learning material.
“How complete is the learning material? Does it reflect the students’ real skills and knowledge?” says Williams. “Every educator should consider these questions before introducing AI analysis.”
3. Tutoring and Support Outside the Classroom
There are many ways to use technology in the classroom, but its potential to help children to learn while at home shouldn’t be underestimated as well. One way in which AI can be applied here is educational applications and platforms. Thanks to technology, they’re becoming more and more advanced and able to respond to different learning styles.
One great example is Google’s Socratic, designed for both K-12 and college students. According to the official guide from Google, you can ask the app for help with tackling problems just by taking a photo of them or saying them out loud.
Socratic app screens. Credit: Google
AI Has a Bright Future in Education
Ai is not as scary as many people think. In fact, it’s been making a lot of impact in the world of education, so we should definitely be open and work on incorporating more AI-powered tools in classrooms. To help kids with learning more technology and AI, we should bring them to the forefront of K-12 education.
Learn more about our #kids2030 campaign. Its mission is to provide children with the skills they need to thrive in today’s highly technological society and help advance the search for pressing issues.
About the Author:
Helene Cue is a passionate writer and editor who explores a broad spectrum of topics that revolve around marketing and tech. She currently works as an in-house writer at GrabMyEssay and as a content marketing specialist at Studicus. Her pieces are always captivating and informative.
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