Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rocked the world with its abilities. In education it can be a helpful tool, but also a potentially harmful one. The ethics of AI use have been discussed and my opinion is in (almost) full support of its use. There are many ways AI can be used in education, by students and by teachers. I was able to explore a few AI tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and MagicSchool. In this post, I am going to focus on MagicSchool as it is the newest one to me.

MagicSchool is an AI platform that has MANY tools. I only explored the teacher version, but there is also a student version. The top tools that interested me were the chatbot (similar to ChatGPT), the report card comment generator, the text summarizer, and the unit/lesson plan generator. As mentioned before, there are many, many more.

Report Card Comment Generator

The report card comment generator is simple and easy to use. The products it produces are definitely usable and can take a huge weight off of teachers’ backs when report card season rolls around. In my opinion, I believe it is difficult to get a personal enough comment from AI, but it can provide a really nice framework and cut the comment-writing process down significantly.

Text Summarizer

For the text summarizer, I tested it out by copying and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia on why we get so much snow in Canada and asked it to summarize it into 5 bullet points. It did a really great job and provided exactly what I asked for. I feel that this tool is definitely useful for both students and teachers. The grade 5 ELA curriculum mentions previewing text; summarizing; making inferences and this can be an awesome tool to model summarizing and help get students started.

Unit Plan Generator

The unit plan generator is probably the most useful tool for teachers in my opinion. Even being a pre-service teacher, coming up with, and writing out unit plans can be grueling. Having something like this to help with the process can be a game changer. Let me show you what it created for a grade 5 unit on simple machines.

In the photo above, you will see that I put in very little information for it to go off of. Here is what it generated for me:

As you can see, it produced a very vague base of a unit to get a teacher started. While it did not create a detailed, ready-to-use unit, it created a base that can still cut the unit planning time by almost half.

Is it Easier to Just use ChatGPT?

When I asked ChatGPT to create a unit on simple machines, It produced a more detailed and almost ready-to-use unit. While MagicSchool is better organized, ChatGPT can do all the same things and in my opinion, it does it better. Here is the simple machine unit it created:

Will I Use These in My Teaching Career?

YES!

These are some really awesome tools that I believe will make my teaching life a heck of a lot easier. While I know I will for sure use ChatGPT and MagicSchool, I am also interested in looking into HeyGen (AI video creator), SciSpace (explains research articles), and Tutor.ai (answer generator).