artificial intelligence in education pros and cons

The Pros and Cons of AI in Special Education

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Special education teachers fill out mountains of paperwork, customize lessons for students with a wide range of learning differences, and attend hours of bureaucratic meetings.

It’s easy to see why it would be tempting to outsource parts of that job to a robot.

While there may never be a special educator version of “Star Wars”’ protocol droid C-3PO, generative artificial tools—including ChatGPT and others developed with the large language models created by its founder, Open AI—can help special education teachers perform parts of their job more efficiently, allowing them to spend more time with their students, experts and educators say.

But those shortcuts come with plenty of cautions, they add.

Teachers need to review artificial intelligence’s suggestions carefully to ensure that they are right for specific students. Student data—including diagnoses of learning differences or cognitive disorders—need to be kept private.

Even special educators who have embraced the technology urge to proceed with care.

“I’m concerned about how AI is being presented right now to educators, that it’s this magical tool,” said Julie Tarasi, who teaches special education at Lakeview Middle School in the Park Hill school district near Kansas City, Mo. She recently completed a course in AI sponsored by the International Society for Technology in Education. “And I don’t think that the AI literacy aspect of it is necessarily being [shared] to the magnitude that it should be with teachers.”

Park Hill is cautiously experimenting with AI’s potential as a paperwork partner for educators and an assistive technology for some students in special education.

The district is on the vanguard. Only about 1 in 6 principals and district leaders—16 percent—said their schools or districts were piloting AI tools or using them in a limited manner with students in special education, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey conducted in March and April.

AI tools may work best for teachers who already have a deep understanding of what works for students in special education, and of the tech itself, said Amanda Morin, a member of the advisory board for the learner-variability project at Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization that works on equity and technology issues in schools.

“If you feel really confident in your special education knowledge and experience and you have explored AI [in depth], I think those two can combine in a way that can really accelerate the way you serve students,” Morin said.

But “if you are a novice at either, it’s not going to serve your students well because you don’t know what you don’t know yet,” she added. “You may not even know if the tool is giving you a good answer.”

Here are some of the areas where Park Hill educators and other school and district leaders see AI’s promise for special education—and what caveats to look out for:

Promise: Reducing the paperwork burden.

Some special education teachers spend as many as eight hours a week writing student-behavior plans, progress reports, and other documentation.

“Inevitably, we’re gonna get stuck, we’re gonna struggle to word things,” Tarasi said. AI can be great for busting through writer’s block or finding a clearer, more objective way to describe a student’s behavior, she said.

What’s more, tools such as Magic School—an AI platform created for K-12 education—can help special education teachers craft the student learning goals that must be included in an individualized education program, or IEP.

“I can say ‘I need a reading goal to teach vowels and consonants to a student,’ and it will generate a goal,” said Tara Bachmann, Park Hill’s assistive-technology facilitator. “You can put the criteria you want in, but it makes it measurable, then my teachers can go in and insert the specifics about the student” without involving AI, Bachmann said.

These workarounds can cut the process of writing an IEP by up to 30 minutes, Bachmann said—giving teachers more time with students.

AI can also come to the rescue when a teacher needs to craft a polite, professional email to a parent after a stress-inducing encounter with their child.

Some Park Hill special education teachers use “Goblin,” a free tool aimed at helping neurodivergent people organize tasks, to take the “spice” out of those messages, Tarasi said.

A teacher could write “the most emotionally charged email. Then you hit a button called ‘formalize.’ And it makes it like incredibly professional,” Bachmann said. “Our teachers like it because they have a way to release the emotion but still communicate the message to the families.”

Caveat: Don’t share personally identifiable student information. Don’t blindly embrace AI’s suggestions.

Teachers must be extremely careful about privacy issues when using AI tools to write documents—from IEPs to emails—that contain sensitive student information, Tarasi said.

“If you wouldn’t put it on a billboard outside of the school, you should not be putting it into any sort of AI,” Tarasi said. “There’s no sense of guaranteed privacy.”

Tarasi advises her colleagues to “absolutely not put in names” when using generative AI to craft documents, she said. While including students’ approximate grade level may be OK in certain circumstances, inputting their exact age or mentioning a unique diagnosis is a no-no.

To be sure, if the information teachers put into AI is too vague, educators might not get accurate suggestions for their reports. That requires a balance.

“You need to be specific without being, without being pinpoint,” Tarasi said.

Caveat: AI works best for teachers who already understand special education

Another caution: Although AI tools can help teachers craft a report or customize a general education lesson for students in special education, teachers need to already have a deep understanding of their students to know whether to adopt its recommendations.

Relying solely on AI tools for lesson planning or writing reports “takes the individualized out of individualized education,” Morin said. “Because what [the technology] is doing is spitting out things that come up a lot” as opposed to carefully considering what’s best for a specific student, like a good teacher can.

Educators can tweak their prompts—the questions they ask AI—to get better, more specific advice, she added.

“A seasoned special educator would be able to say ‘So I have a student with ADHD, and they’re fidgety’ and get more individualized recommendations,” Morin said.

Promise: Making lessons more accessible.

Ensuring students in special education master the same course content as their peers can require teachers to spend hours simplifying the language of a text to an appropriate reading level.

Generative AI tools can accomplish that same task—often called “leveling a text"—in just minutes, said Josh Clark, the leader of the Landmark School , a private school in Massachusetts serving children with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences.

“If you have a class of 30 kids in 9th grade, and they’re all reading about photosynthesis, then for one particular child, you can customize [the] reading level without calling them out and without anybody else knowing and without you, the teacher, spending hours,” Clark said. “I think that’s a super powerful way of allowing kids to access information they may not be able to otherwise.”

Similarly, in Park Hill, Bachmann has used Canva—a design tool with a version specifically geared toward K-12 schools and therefore age-appropriate for many students—to help a student with cerebral palsy create the same kind of black-and-white art his classmates were making.

Kristen Ponce, the district’s speech and language pathologist, has used Canva to provide visuals for students in special education as they work to be more specific in their communication.

Case-in-point: One of Ponce’s students loves to learn about animals, but he has a very clear idea of what he’s looking for, she said. If the student just says “bear,” Canva will pull up a picture of, for instance, a brown grizzly. But the student may have been thinking of a polar bear.

That gives Ponce the opportunity to tell him, “We need to use more words to explain what you’re trying to say here,” she said. “We were able to move from ‘bear’ to ‘white bear on ice.’”

Caveat: It’s not always appropriate to use AI as an accessibility tool.

Not every AI tool can be used with every student. For instance, there are age restrictions for tools like ChatGPT, which isn’t for children under 13 or those under 18 without parent permission, Bachmann said. (ChatGPT does not independently verify a user’s age.)

“I caution my staff about introducing it to children who are too young and remembering that and that we try to focus on what therapists and teachers can do collectively to make life easier for [students],” she said.

“Accessibility is great,” she said. But when a teacher is thinking about “unleashing a child freely on AI, there is caution to it.”

Promise: Using AI tools to help students in special education communicate.

Park Hill is just beginning to use AI tools to help students in special education express their ideas.

One recent example: A student with a traumatic brain injury that affected her language abilities made thank you cards for several of her teachers using Canva.

“She was able to generate personal messages to people like the school nurses,” Bachmann said. “To her physical therapist who has taken her to all kinds of events outside in the community. She said, ‘You are my favorite therapist.’ She got very personal.”

There may be similar opportunities for AI to help students in special education write more effectively.

Some students with learning and thinking differences have trouble organizing their thoughts or getting their point across.

“When we ask a child to write, we’re actually asking them to do a whole lot of tasks at once,” Clark said. Aspects of writing that might seem relatively simple to a traditional learner—word retrieval, grammar, punctuation, spelling—can be a real roadblock for some students in special education, he said.

“It’s a huge distraction,” Clark said. The student may “have great ideas, but they have difficulty coming through.”

Caveat: Students may miss out on the critical-thinking skills writing builds.

Having students with language-processing differences use AI tools to better express themselves holds potential, but if it is not done carefully, students may miss developing key skills, said Digital Promise’s Morin.

AI “can be a really positive adaptive tool, but I think you have to be really structured about how you’re doing it,” she said.

ChatGPT or a similar tool may be able to help a student with dyslexia or a similar learning difference “create better writing, which I think is different than writing better,” Morin said.

Since it’s likely that students will be able to use those tools in the professional world, it makes sense that they begin using them in school, she said.

But the tools available now may not adequately explain the rationale behind the changes they make to a student’s work or help students express themselves more clearly in the future.

“The process is just as important as the outcome, especially with kids who learn differently, right?” Morin said. “Your process matters.”

Clark agreed on the need for moving cautiously. His own school is trying what he described as “isolated experiments” in using AI to help students with language-processing differences express themselves better.

The school is concentrating, for now, on older students preparing to enter college. Presumably, many will be able to use AI to complete some postsecondary assignments. “How do we make sure it’s an equal playing field?” Clark said.

A version of this article appeared in the May 22, 2024 edition of Education Week as The Pros and Cons of AI in Special Education

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Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education: Pros and Cons

Discover digital literacy and why it's important for success in the modern world..

source: The Education Daily

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various fields has gained immense popularity in recent years, including education. AI offers a plethora of benefits to students, educators, and institutions. However, as with any technological advancement, AI comes with its own set of challenges and concerns. This article aims to explore the pros and cons of AI in education, the applications of AI in education, its impacts on education, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Understanding Artificial Intelligence

AI Applications in Education

• Pros and Cons of AI in Education
• Impacts of AI on Education

Understanding Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial Intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. Machine Learning (ML), a subset of AI, enables machines to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. AI and ML have several applications in various fields, including education.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the sector of training, providing a extensive range of packages which have the potential to customise gaining knowledge of, decorate engagement, and improve general instructional effects. Here are a number of the most top notch AI packages in education:

Personalized Learning: AI algorithms can analyze scholar facts, including educational performance, mastering patterns, and pursuits, to create personalised gaining knowledge of plans that cater to each student’s precise wishes. This can involve tailoring content issue, recommending additional sources, and imparting adaptive comments.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems: AI-powered tutoring structures can offer individualized practise and aid to college students, supplying real-time comments, answering questions, and guiding college students via complex ideas. These systems can adapt to every pupil’s tempo and knowledge, providing personalised assistance as wished.

Automated Grading and Feedback: AI can automate the grading of assignments, essays, and exams, releasing up teachers’ time to attention on more individualized interactions with students. AI-powered grading systems also can offer unique remarks, figuring out areas for development and suggesting remedial strategies.

Language Learning Tools: AI-based totally language getting to know gear can provide personalised language preparation, imparting adaptive sports, interactive dialogues, and actual-time comments on pronunciation and grammar. These tools can decorate language studying for students of all ranges and proficiency.

Predictive Analytics: AI algorithms can examine scholar statistics to predict potential challenges or areas for improvement, allowing teachers to proactively interfere and offer additional support. This can help prevent college students from falling in the back of and enhance normal instructional performance.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide students with immediately aid, answering questions, resolving technical problems, and directing them to applicable resources. These tools can enhance scholar engagement and delight, specially for college students in faraway or on line getting to know environments.

Adaptive Learning Platforms: AI-pushed adaptive studying systems can adjust the issue of coursework and provide personalised guidelines based totally on each pupil’s development and knowledge. This ensures that students are continuously challenged and engaged, at the same time as fending off frustration or boredom.

Educational Content Creation and Curation: AI can help within the advent and curation of educational content material, producing personalised mastering materials, summarizing complex principles, and supplying alternative causes for tough topics. This can help teachers create extra enticing and powerful mastering reports.

Accessibility Tools: AI-powered tools can enhance accessibility for college kids with disabilities, which include supplying text-to-speech synthesis, real-time captioning, and opportunity enter techniques. This can assist make certain that every one college students have equal access to educational possibilities.

Assessment and Evaluation: AI may be used to expand extra comprehensive and insightful exams, providing instructors with a deeper know-how of pupil strengths, weaknesses, and gaining knowledge of styles. This statistics may be used to improve coaching techniques and tailor practise to person wishes.

AI applications in schooling are nonetheless in their early degrees of improvement, but the capacity for transformation is great. As AI era maintains to conform, we can anticipate to peer even greater modern and impactful programs to be able to revolutionize the way we educate and learn.

Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Benefits of artificial intelligence in education.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the field of education, offering both benefits and challenges. Here’s a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons of AI in education:

Personalized Learning: AI can analyze student data to identify individual strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles. This allows for personalized instruction that caters to each student’s unique needs, leading to more effective learning outcomes.

Enhanced Engagement and Motivation: AI-powered tools can create engaging and interactive learning experiences, such as adaptive learning platforms and gamification. This can increase student engagement, motivation, and overall interest in the subject matter.

Automated Tasks and Administrative Support: AI can automate routine tasks, such as grading assignments, scheduling, and managing student records. This frees up teachers’ time to focus on more personalized interactions with students and provide more individualized support.

Accessibility and Equity: AI-powered tools can provide access to high-quality education for students in remote areas or those with disabilities. AI can also help bridge the digital divide and ensure equitable access to educational opportunities.

Real-time Feedback and Assessment: AI can provide immediate feedback on assignments and assessments, allowing students to identify areas for improvement and track their progress in real-time. This timely feedback can significantly enhance the learning process.

Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Education

AI in education faces several challenges, including concerns over data privacy and security, the potential for AI to perpetuate bias and discrimination, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI in education. There are also concerns about the potential loss of jobs for educators, as AI may replace certain tasks previously done by educators, such as grading and providing feedback.

Overreliance on Technology: Overdependence on AI tools can hinder the development of critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, and social-emotional intelligence in students. Human interaction and guidance remain crucial for holistic development.

Data Privacy and Bias Concerns: AI algorithms rely on data collection and analysis, raising concerns about data privacy and potential bias. It is essential to ensure responsible data use, transparency, and ethical considerations in AI implementation.

Teacher Displacement and Role Redefinition: AI automation may lead to concerns about teacher displacement. However, AI should be seen as a tool to augment teachers’ capabilities, not replace them. Teachers’ roles may evolve to focus on more personalized interactions, creative instruction, and human-centered support.

Algorithmic Bias and Fairness: AI algorithms may perpetuate existing biases in society, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes in education. It is crucial to develop unbiased AI algorithms and ensure fairness in AI-based decision-making.

Equity and Access to Technology: AI-powered tools may exacerbate the digital divide, further disadvantaging students without access to technology or reliable internet connections. Ensuring equitable access to technology is essential for the effective implementation of AI in education.

Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on Education

• AI and Personalised Learning: AI can enhance personalized learning experiences by tailoring content and activities to each student’s individual needs and learning styles. AI can analyze student academic performance, behaviour, and preferences data to provide customized recommendations, feedback, and resources.
• AI and Student Engagement: AI can improve student engagement by providing interactive and engaging learning experiences. AI-powered chatbots can provide instant feedback and support, creating a sense of connection and engagement with students.
• AI and Academic Performance: AI can enhance academic performance by identifying areas where students may be struggling and providing targeted support. AI algorithms can analyze student academic performance, behaviour, and preferences data to provide customized recommendations, feedback, and resources.
• AI and Learning Outcomes: AI can improve learning outcomes by providing personalized learning experiences and identifying areas where students may be struggling. AI can also provide real-time data analytics, allowing educators to identify patterns in student performance and adjust their teaching accordingly to improve learning outcomes.
• AI and Assessment:  AI can enhance assessment practices by automating grading and providing real-time feedback to students. This can free up educators’ time to focus on teaching and mentoring, while also providing students with instant feedback to help them improve their performance.
• AI and Teachers: AI can support educators by automating repetitive tasks such as grading, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks such as teaching and mentoring. AI can also provide real-time data analytics, allowing educators to identify areas where students may be struggling and adjust their teaching accordingly.
• AI and Ethics in Education: There are several ethical considerations surrounding AI in education. These include concerns over data privacy and security, potential biases in AI algorithms, and the potential loss of jobs for educators. Educators and institutions need to consider these ethical considerations and ensure that AI is being used responsibly and ethically in education.

In conclusion, AI has the potential to revolutionize education, offering personalized learning, enhanced engagement, and increased accessibility. However, it is crucial to address the potential drawbacks, such as overreliance on technology, data privacy concerns, and algorithmic bias. By carefully considering the pros and cons, we can harness the power of AI to enhance education while ensuring equity, fairness, and human-centered learning.

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The Pros and Cons of AI in Education and How it Will Impact Teachers in 2024

Dianne Adlawan

The future is indeed here. It has no doubt that Artificial Intelligence in education is gaining popularity among teachers and students. Educators use AI in the form of EdTech tools to aid them in creating lesson plans or computing students’ grades while as for the learners, AI can assist them to accomplish their projects, homework, and even research papers. While we can’t deny that Artificial Intelligence in 2024 is becoming a part of our lives now, there are still a couple of pros and cons of AI that need further attention and are still up for discussion. In this blog, we will help you to identify each of those pros and cons, and what important role should you be taking on to ensure AI usage for education is still in moderation. Lastly, we will weigh the advantages and disadvantages of AI and decide if teachers should incorporate the usage of AI in the form of EdTech tools in their teaching strategy.

The Advantages of AI in Education

In this modern world, integrating AI technology grows rapidly in education. AI is there to assist and make our day-to-day tasks lighter. With a proper prompt, any activity that you wish to get done will be accomplished in a matter of seconds. This is just one of the many Pros of AI, let’s discuss more!

1. Improved Student Engagement and Motivation

The use of AI applications in teaching can enhance the learning experience in many ways such as personalized learning exercises thanks to AI algorithms or instant feedback and communication thanks to AI natural language processing. AI can also be employed to enhance gamified learning which can further make learning enjoyable, engaging, and rewarding. Using AI tools can guide educators to use a more interactive teaching approach which may result in increased engagement and motivation in the class as well as improved learning objectives.

2. Enhancing Student Performance

Another significant pro of artificial intelligence in education is that it can help enhance student performance with increased feedback. AI-powered systems can evaluate students’ progress, provide them with targeted feedback, and identify areas where they need improvement. Moreover, AI can monitor students’ behavior patterns, assess their attention levels, and determine if they need additional assistance in certain subjects, granular areas, or specific skills. Instant, AI-powered feedback along will enhanced learning experiences can be expected to push students’ abilities to new heights.

3. Cost-Effective Learning

Using AI in Education can also reduce the cost of education from an educational institution’s perspective, and quite significantly if used to its potential. AI can automate a number of tasks assigned to administration, teachers, IT, and more. For example, AI can take on daily tasks such as grading, scheduling, data management, and even tutoring. With AI in education, educational institutions can save on budget by cutting down resources required to operate efficiently, thereby increasing cost-effectiveness.

4. Continuous Evaluation and Improvement in the long run

Last on our Pros of AI list is continuous evaluation and improvement. AI-powered EdTech tools can easily collect, analyze, and provide report data to teachers on student learning outcomes and behavior patterns. By using predictive analytics, AI can provide educators with valuable insights from predicting future performance, providing personalized interventions, early identification of at-risk students, and refining instructional strategies.

This useful information can enable educators to have a more in-depth evaluation in understanding their student’s strengths and weaknesses in the classroom. In addition, teachers can have the chance to take their teaching strategies to the next level and give the best learning experiences to their students.

How EdTech tools can contribute to an engaging and interactive class

We’re not new to the existence of EdTech or Educational Tools in terms of helping teachers to perform engaging and interactive activities in their classes. As a part of the Pros of AI in education, Let us dive more into how AI tools can be of service to educators and in what ways it can lighten their daily teaching needs.

Artificial intelligence in EdTech tools can serve as a teacher’s assistant, it saves time without sacrificing the quality of its output. One of the many good examples of a friendly AI-powered tool is ClassPoint AI. ClassPoint AI’s main goal is to ease every teacher’s workload in creating quizzes by effortlessly generating captivating questions from any PowerPoint slide in an instant. Built by a team of experts with a passion for education and technology, ClassPoint’s advanced AI technology carefully detects your PowerPoint slide and creates thought-provoking questions out of it.

Each and every EdTech tool out there has its own unique ways and features to aid teachers in anything that they need, that’s why we also covered 7 AI tools that every teacher can use in this modern era of 2024.

Cons and Challenges of AI in Education

For every single thing in this world to be balanced, one must have Pros and Cons, and AI is not an exception of it. What can become a challenge in AI that we can consider as cons? Let’s continue to identify.

1. Threat to Teacher’s Job Security

First on the list are the threats to teachers’ job security. This is not happening yet, but it is a concern that the advancement and adoption of AI could impact the need for certain job roles in education. The way AI continues to automate more aspects of the education process, there may be fewer demands for human educators, which could lead to both improved productivity and potential job loss.

2. Dehumanized Learning Experience

One of the biggest cons of AI in education is that it can dehumanize the learning experience. With AI algorithms generating content and deciding the pacing of the lessons, students may miss out on the nuanced approach that a human teacher can offer. Additionally, AI algorithms can perpetuate bias, meaning that they may fail to provide an inclusive and diverse curriculum that is tailored to the needs of every student.

3. Costly to Implement for Teachers

Another disadvantage of AI in education is that it can be costly to implement for teachers. Not all schools and educational institutions have a dedicated budget for investing in AI tools and technologies. Plus the cost of mass-implementing AI into schools may be too great at this time. If the teacher will be the one to shoulder the cost, it can be expensive, and challenging to maintain.

4. Dependence on Technology

As schools become increasingly reliant on AI-powered solutions, there is a risk that teachers and students may become too reliant on technology. In the long run, this dependence could result in the neglect of important traditional teaching methods and the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Human Intervention: The Roles of Teachers

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly significant role in transforming how students learn and how teachers instruct. However, as with any innovation, there are both pros and cons of AI when incorporating it into the classroom and when there are too many challenges happening in the class, this is where human intervention is set to come in.

Now the question is, what important role should teachers be taking to ensure AI usage for education among students is still in moderation?

• Teachers and AI can collaborate in co-teaching scenarios, where AI systems may assist in instruction, assessment, and real-time feedback & tutoring, while teachers offer guidance, interpretation, and deeper engagement with the material
• The role of teachers as mentors, motivators, and facilitators of learning will remain essential. Teachers bring human connection, empathy, social-emotional skills, and the ability to foster creativity and critical thinking, which cannot be replicated by AI.
• The teacher-AI collaboration will harness the power of technology while upholding the invaluable human elements of education.

As simple as it looks, teachers can still have the power to set rules and boundaries in class . Set a strict rule of prohibiting the usage internet in any face-to-face class activities and allow students to think freely and creatively using their gained knowledge from past lessons.

Given these pros and cons, it is also essential that EdTech companies and schools work together to create a balanced approach to AI in education. Teachers play a crucial role in this effort by understanding how to best integrate AI tools into their instruction, while still maintaining their core role as educators.

Time to Weight in! Is Using Artificial Intelligence in Education have more Pros or Cons?

As we’re nearing our conclusion, the Pros and Cons of AI are both intense; but as a teacher, should you restrict yourself from using AI for educational purposes? Definitely not. Our world is evolving, and we need to embrace that the power of Artificial Intelligence is likely to bring more benefits than harm, so you might want to expect its adoption not only in education but in every industry. We just have to learn to use it in moderation and set a good image for our students to not fully rely on Artificial Intelligence. Confidence in your expertise, trust in your skills, and better judgment is the key.

Nothing can still replace the emotions and compassion a human teacher has toward their students. Ma. Theresa Ganaden, ClassPoint Philippines Community member

Overall, the evolving role of AI in education offers both opportunities and challenges for teachers. By being proactive in their approach to this technology, educators can leverage AI to improve student outcomes and promote equity in the classroom, while still preserving the unique role that teachers play in fostering growth, development, and learning in their students. That is why it is still necessary to incorporate the usage of AI-powered EdTech tools as a part of teachers’ teaching strategies.

With the help of ClassPoint AI, teachers wouldn’t need too much work on creating insightful quiz questions. ClassPoint AI is made to analyze teachers’ lesson slides and generate questions from it. It promotes a healthy balance of trusting the teacher’s expertise in any subject by purely relying on the information they wrote in the PowerPoint and working its magic in stimulating questions in just seconds.

For the latest tips, trends and tools about AI in education, read our  A-Z guide to AI in education !

About Dianne Adlawan

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Ai in the classroom: pros, cons and the role of edtech companies.

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By Olufemi Shonubi, co-founder/CTO, Edutech Global .

Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the way we learn and teach. As a tool in the classroom, AI can provide students with personalized learning experiences, automate repetitive tasks and provide instant feedback. However, it also has its limitations. Let us explore the pros and cons of AI as a tool in the classroom, address the concern that AI could be a threat to teachers' and instructors' jobs and discuss the role of edtech companies in advancing this AI use case.

Advantages Of AI In The Classroom

One of the main advantages I see of AI in the classroom is personalized learning. AI-powered educational tools can analyze data on student performance and provide tailored support to improve their grades.

AI can also provide instant feedback. For example, AI-powered educational tools can provide students with immediate feedback on their work, allowing them to identify and correct mistakes quickly.

Another advantage of AI is its ability to automate repetitive tasks. It can grade assignments and quizzes, which can free up teachers' time for other tasks, such as lesson planning and providing more one-on-one attention to students.

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There are already a few AI tools that are supporting learning in classroom or workplace contexts. For example, Ahura is an AI-powered learning assistant that tracks learning habits by observing attention and engagement. Knewton offers an adaptive learning platform that provides personalized learning experiences for students. Querium is an AI-powered tutor that provides students with step-by-step tutoring on math problems and builds personalized lesson plans. ALEKS is an AI-powered learning platform that provides individualized learning paths based on students' strengths and weaknesses. Carnegie Learning offers an AI-powered tutor that helps students improve their math skills by providing personalized learning based on their performance. There's also Smart Sparrow, which allows users to provide constructive feedback that is unique to each student. Finally, Gradescope is an AI-powered grading tool that automates the grading process, which can free up teachers' time and allow them to provide more individualized attention to students.

These are just a few examples of AI tools with applications in the classroom. It is important to note that these tools should not replace teachers but rather assist them in their work.

Downsides And Challenges Of AI In The Classroom

Some teachers and instructors may see AI as a threat to their jobs, believing it will automate their tasks and make them redundant. But it is important to note that AI is not meant to replace teachers but rather to assist them in their work. AI is a tool and should be developed and used as such.

There are also negatives to consider, one of which is the cost of developing and implementing AI-powered educational tools. This can be a significant barrier for schools and teachers who need more resources to invest in AI technology.

There is also the lack of human interaction and emotional support that students receive when using AI-powered educational tools. While AI can provide personalized learning and instant feedback, it cannot replace the human and emotional support that students need to succeed, and relying too heavily on AI-powered educational tools may impact students negatively.

Privacy concerns are also a limitation of AI in the classroom. AI-powered educational tools may collect and store sensitive personal data, which raises concerns about privacy and security.

The Role Of EdTech Companies

Edtech companies play a crucial role in advancing the use of AI in the classroom and ensuring that it is used ethically and responsibly. To do so, they should consider the following:

1. Cost: The cost of developing and implementing AI-powered educational tools can be a significant barrier for schools and teachers. Edtech companies should work to make AI technology accessible to a broader range of schools and teachers and explore alternative funding options, such as grants or partnerships, to help offset the costs.

2. Human interaction: AI-powered educational tools cannot replace the human and emotional support that students need to succeed. Edtech companies should aim to develop AI tools that augment, rather than replace, the role of teachers and provide students with a well-rounded education that includes both personalized learning and human interaction.

3. Privacy and security: Privacy concerns are a significant limitation of AI in the classroom. Edtech companies must ensure that the sensitive personal data collected and stored by AI-powered educational tools are properly secured and that privacy is maintained.

4. Improved AI capabilities: Current AI-powered educational tools have limitations, such as a lack of creativity and originality and a limited understanding of context. Edtech companies should aim to improve AI capabilities and overcome these limitations to create more advanced, innovative and effective AI tools for the classroom.

5. Ethical considerations: Edtech companies should consider the ethical implications of AI technology in education and develop AI tools in a transparent, fair and responsible manner. They must also ensure that they develop and use AI tools in accordance with the laws and regulations governing data privacy, security and intellectual property.

In conclusion, AI has the potential to be a valuable addition to the classroom. Still, edtech companies should develop AI tools with caution and in collaboration with teachers, educators and students to ensure that they are helpful, ethical and effective in meeting the needs of learners. I believe that AI could revolutionize the way we teach and learn.

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Educating in a World of Artificial Intelligence

• Posted February 9, 2023
• By Jill Anderson
• Learning Design and Instruction
• Teachers and Teaching
• Technology and Media

Senior Researcher Chris Dede isn't overly worried about growing concerns over generative artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, in education. As a longtime researcher on emerging technologies, he's seen many decades where new technologies promised to upend the field. Instead, Dede says artificial intelligence requires educators to get smarter about how they teach in order to truly take advantage of what AI has to offer.“The trick about AI is that to get it, we need to change what we're educating people for because if you educate people for what AI does well, you're just preparing them to lose to AI. But if you educate them for what AI can't do, then you've got IA [Intelligence Augmentation],” he says. Dede, the associate director of research for the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education , says AI raises the bar and it has the power to significantly impact learning in powerful ways.

In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Dede talks about how the field of education needs to evolve and get smarter, in order to work with — not against — artificial intelligence. 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Dede's keynote on Intelligence Augmentation , delivered at an AI and Education conference
• Brief on Intelligence Augmentation, co-authored by Dede for HGSE’s Next Level Lab

Jill Anderson:  I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

Chris Dede thinks we need to get smarter about using artificial intelligence and education. He has spent decades exploring emerging learning technologies as a Harvard researcher. The recent explosion of generative AI, like ChatGPT, has been met with mixed reactions in education. Some public school districts have banned it. Some colleges and universities have tweaked their teaching and learning already. 

Generative AI raises que

Chris Dede: I've actually been working with AI for more than half a century. Way back when when I was a graduate student, I read the first article on AI in education, which was published in 1970. And the author confidently predicted that we wouldn't need teachers within five or six years because AI was going to do everything. And of course, we still see predictions like that today. 

But having lived through nine hype cycles for AI, I'm both impressed by how much it's advanced, but I'm also wary about elaborate claims for it. And there is a lot of excitement now about generative AI is the term that people are using, which includes programs like ChatGPT. It includes things like Dolly that are capable of creating images. It includes really AI on its own doing performances that we previously would have thought were something that people would have to do. 

But it's interesting to compare ChatGPT to a search engine. And people don't remember this, but there was a time when-- before search engines when people really struggled to find resources, and there was enormous excitement when search engines came out. And search engines are, in fact, AI. They are based on AI at the back end, coming up with lists of things that hopefully match what you typed in. In fact, the problem with the search engine becomes not trying to find anything, but trying to filter everything to decide what's really useful. 

So you can think of ChatGPT as the next step beyond a search engine where instead of getting a list of things and then you decide which might be useful and you examine them, you get an answer that says, this is what I think you want. And that is really more the AI taking charge than it is the AI saying, I can help you. Here's some things that you might look at and decide about. That makes me wary because AI is not at a stage where it really understands what it's saying. 

And so it will make up things when it doesn't know them, kind of a not very good student seeing if they can fake out the teacher. And it will provide answers that are not customized to somebody's culture or to somebody's reading level or to somebody's other characteristics. So it's really quite limited. 

I know that Harvard has sent some wording out that I've now put into my syllabi about students being welcome to use whatever tools they want. But when they present something as their work, it has to be something that they wrote themselves. It can't be something that somebody else wrote, which is classic plagiarism. It can't be something that Chat AI wrote that they're presenting as their work and so on. I think that what Chat AI does is it raises the bar for human performance. 

I know a lot about what people are going through now in terms of job interviews because my older daughter is an HR manager, and my younger daughter just graduated. And she's having a lot of job interviews. And in contrast to earlier times, now, job interviews typically involve a performance. 

If you're going to be hired for a marketing position, they'll say bring in a marketing plan when we do our face-to-face interview on this, and we'll evaluate it. Or in her case, in mechanical engineering, they say when you come in, there's this system that you're going to have a chance to debug, and we'll see how well you do it. Those employers are going to type the same thing into Chat AI. And if someone comes in with something that isn't any better than Chat AI, they're not going to get hired because why hire somebody that can't outcompete a free resource? 

Jill Anderson:  Oh interesting. 

Chris Dede: So it raises the bar for human performance in an interesting way. 

Jill Anderson:  Your research looks at something called intelligence augmentation. I want to know what that means and how that's different from artificial intelligence. 

Chris Dede: Intelligence augmentation is really about the opposite of this sort of negative example I was describing where now you've got to outthink Chat AI if you want to get a job. It says, when is the whole more than the sum of the parts? When do a person and AI working together do things that neither one could do as well on their own? 

And often, people think, well, yeah, I can see a computer programmer, there might be intelligence augmentation because I know that machines can start to do programming. What they don't realize is that it applies to a wide range of jobs, including mine, as a college professor. So I am the associate director for research in a national AI institute funded by the National Science Foundation on adult learning and online education. And one of the things the Institute is building is AI assistants for college faculty. 

So there's question answering assistants to help with student questions, and there's tutoring assistants and library assistants and laboratory assistants. There's even a social assistant that can help students in a large class meet other students who might be good learning partners. So now, as a professor, I'm potentially surrounded by all these assistants who are doing parts of my job, and I can be deskilled by that, which is a bad future. You sort of end up working for the assistant where they say, well, here's a question I can't answer. 

So you have to do it. Or you can upskill because the assistant is taking over routine parts of the job. And in turn, you can focus much more deeply on personalization to individual students, on bringing in cultural dimensions and equity dimensions that AI does not understand and cannot possibly help with. The trick about AI is that to get it, we need to change what we're educating people for because if you educate people for what AI does well, you're just preparing them to lose to AI. But if you educate them for what AI can't do, then you've got IA. 

Jill Anderson:  So that's the goal here. We have to change the way that we're educating young people, even older people at this point. I mean, everybody needs to change the way that they're learning about these things and interacting with them. 

Chris Dede: They do. And we're hampered by our system of assessment because the assessments that we use, including Harvard with the GRE and the SAT and so on, those are what AI does well. AI can score really well on psychometric tests. So we're using the wrong measure, if you will. We need to use performance assessments to measure what people can do to get into places like Harvard or higher education in general because that's emphasizing the skills that are going to be really useful for them. 

Jill Anderson:  You mentioned at the start artificial intelligence isn't really something brand new. This has been around for decades, but we're so slow to adapt and prepare and alter the way that we do things that once it reaches kind of the masses, we're already behind. 

Chris Dede:  Well, we are. And the other part of it is that we keep putting old wine in new bottles. I mean, this is — if I had to write a headline for the entire history of educational technology, it would be old wine in new bottles. But we don't understand what the new bottle really means. 

So let me give you an example of something that I think generative AI could make a big difference, be very powerful, but I'm not seeing it discussed in all the hype about generative AI. And that is evidence-based modeling for local decisions. So let's take climate change. 

One of the problems with climate change is that let's say that you're in Des Moines, Iowa, and you read about all this flooding in California. And you say to yourself, well, I'm not next to an ocean. I don't live in California. And I don't see why I should be that worried about this stuff. 

Now, no one has done a study, I assume, of flooding in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2050 based on mid-level projections about climate change. But with generative AI, we can estimate that now. 

Generative AI can reach out across topographic databases, meteorological databases, and other related databases to come up with here's the parts of Des Moines that are going to go underwater in 2050 and here's how often this is going to happen if these models are correct. That really changes the dialogue about climate change because now you're talking about wait a minute.  You mean that park I take my kids to is going to have a foot of water in it? So I think that kind of evidence-based modeling is not something that people are doing with generative AI right now, but it's perfectly feasible. And that's the new wine that we can put in the new bottle. 

Jill Anderson:  That's really a great way to use that. I mean, and you could even use that in your classroom. Something that you said a long, long time ago was that — and this is paraphrasing — the idea that we often implement new technology, and we make this mistake of focusing on students first rather than teachers.   Chris Dede:  In December, I gave a keynote at a conference called Empowering Learners for the Age of AU that has been held the last few years. And one of the things I talked about was the shift from teaching to learning. Both are important, but teaching is ultimately sort of pouring knowledge into the minds of learners. And learning is much more open ended, and it's essential for the future because every time you need to learn something new, you can't afford to go back and have another master's degree. You need to be able to do self-directed learning. 

And where AI can be helpful with this is that AI can be like an intellectual partner, even when you don't have a teacher that can help you learn in different ways. One of the things that I've been working on with a professor at the Harvard Business School is AI systems that can help you learn negotiation. 

Now, the AI can't be the person you're negotiating with. AI is not good at playing human beings — not yet and not for quite a long time, I think. But what AI can do is to create a situation where a human being can play three people at once. So here you are. You're learning how to negotiate a raise. 

You go into a virtual conference room. There's three virtual people who are three bosses. There's one simulation specialist behind all three, and you negotiate with them. And then at the end, the system gives you some advice on what you did well and not so well. 

And if you have a human mentor, that person gives you advice as well. Ronda Bandy, who was a professor in HGSE until she moved to Hunter College, she and I have published five articles on the work we did for the HGSE's Reach Every Reader Project on using this kind of digital puppeteering to help teachers practice equitable discussion leading. So again, here's something that people aren't talking about where AI on the front end can create rich evocative situations, and AI and machine learning on the back end can find really interesting patterns for improvement. 

Jill Anderson:  You know, Chris, how hard is it to get there for educators? 

Chris Dede: I think, in part, that's what these national AI institutes are about. Our institute, which is really adult learning with a workplace focus, is looking at that part of the spectrum. There's another institute whose focus is middle school and high school and developing AI partners for students where the student and the partner are learning together in a different kind of IA. There's a third Institute that's looking at narrative and storytelling as a powerful form of education and how can AI help with narrative and storytelling. 

You can imagine sitting down. Mom and dad aren't around. You've got a storybook like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you've got something like Alexa that can listen to what you're reading and respond. 

And so you begin, and you say, Goldilocks went out of her house one day and went into the woods and got lost. And Alexa says, why do you think Goldilocks went into the woods? Was she a naughty girl? No. Or was she an adventurous girl, or was she deeply concerned about climate change and wanting to study ecosystems? 

I mean, I'm being playful about this, but I think the point is that AI doesn't understand any of the questions that it's asking but it can ask the questions, and then the child can start to think deeper than just regurgitating the story. So there's all sorts of possibilities here that we just have to think of as new wine instead of asking how can AI automate our order thinking about teaching and learning. 

Jill Anderson:  I've been hearing a lot of concern about writing in particular-- writing papers where young people are actually expressing their own ideas, concerns about plagiarism and cheating, which I would say the latter have long existed as challenges in education, aren't really a new one. Does AI really change this? And how might a higher ed or any educator really look at this differently? 

Chris Dede:  So I think where AI changes this is it helps us understand the kind of writing that we should be teaching versus the kind of writing that we are teaching. So I remember preparing my children for the SAT, and it used to have something called the essay section. And you had to write this very formal essay that was a certain number of paragraphs, and the topic sentences each had to do this and so on. 

Nobody in the world writes those kinds of essays in the real world. They're just like an academic exercise. And of course, AI now can do that beautifully. 

But any reporter will tell you that they could never use Chat AI to write their stories because stories is what they write. They write narratives. If you just put in a description, you'll be fired from your reportorial job because no one is interested in descriptions. They want a story. 

So giving students a description and teaching them to turn it into a story or teaching them to turn it into something else that has a human and creative dimension for it, how would you write this for a seventh-grader that doesn't have much experience with the world? How would you write this for somebody in Russia building on the foundation of what AI gives you and taking it in ways that only people can? That's where writing should be going. 

And of course, good writing teachers will tell you, well, that's nothing new. I've been teaching my students how to write descriptive essays. The people who are most qualified to talk about the limits of AI are the ones who teach what the AI is supposedly doing. 

Jill Anderson:  So do you have any helpful tips for educators regardless of what level they're working at on where to kind of begin embracing this technology? 

Chris Dede: What AI can do well is what's called reckoning, which is calculative prediction. And I've given some examples of that with flooding in Des Moines and other kinds of things. And what people do is practical wisdom, if you will, and it involves culture and ethics and what it's like to be embodied and to have the biological things that are part of human nature and so on. 

So when I look at what I'm teaching, I have to ask myself, how much of what I'm teaching is reckoning? So I'm preparing people to lose to AI. And how much of what I'm teaching is practical wisdom? 

So for example, we spend a lot of time in vocational technical education and standard academic education teaching people to factor. How do you factor these complex polynomials? 

There is no workplace anywhere in the world, even in the most primitive possible conditions, where anybody makes a living by factoring. It's an app. It's an app on a phone. Should you know a little bit about factoring so it's not magic? Sure. 

Should you become fluent in factoring? Absolutely not. It's on the wrong side of the equation.  So I think just teachers and curriculum developers and assessors and stakeholders in the outcomes of education need to ask themselves, what is being taught now, and which parts of it are shifting over? And how do we include enough about those parts that AI isn't magic? But how do we change the balance of our focus to be more on the practical wisdom side? 

Jill Anderson:  So final thoughts here — don't be scared but figure out how to use this to your advantage? 

Chris Dede: Yeah, don't be scared. AI is not smart. It really isn't. People would be appalled if they knew how little AI understands what it's telling you, especially given how much people seem to be relying on it. But it is capable of taking over parts of what you do that are routine and predictable and, in turn, freeing up the creative and the innovative and the human parts that are really the rewarding part of both work the life. 

EdCast: Chris Dede is a senior research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also a co-principal investigator of the National Artificial Intelligence Institute in adult learning and online education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.  [MUSIC PLAYING] 

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How K–12 Schools Can Use Artificial Intelligence in Education

Alexandra Frost is a Cincinnati-based freelance journalist, content marketing writer, copywriter and editor published in  The Washington Post ,  Glamour ,  Shape ,  Today’s Parent ,  Reader’s Digest ,  Parents ,  Women’s Health  and Insider. Alex has a Master of Arts in Teaching degree and a bachelor’s degree in mass communications/journalism, both from Miami University near Cincinnati. She also taught high school for 10 years, specializing in media education.

What role will artificial intelligence play in the future of education? For educators, AI can feel like an exciting development — or a terrifying unknown.

AI technology is advancing quickly and creating solutions once thought impossible. It’s widely available in various technologies and, in many places,  already being integrated into the classroom . The pandemic spurred the development of educational technology out of necessity, including the development of AI. Suddenly, educators needed ways to obtain more information virtually.

“We were starting to work on AI during the pandemic, but it sped up because there was a huge demand for it,” says Mike Tholfsen, principal group product manager at  Microsoft Education . “All these things were happening online, and teachers were saying. ‘I don’t know what’s happening in my classroom anymore.’”

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With educators busier than ever, Tholfsen says, the greatest benefit AI can offer them is time. AI programs can gather data teachers would traditionally have to gather themselves manually.

What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Trying to define artificial intelligence is a bit like asking about the meaning of life: You will get a slightly different answer from everyone. At its core, AI is an area of computer science addressing the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.

Michelle Zimmerman , a classroom teacher, researcher and school leader at Renton Prep Christian School in Washington state and author of the book  Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning , notes that psychologists and neurologists in the field don’t even agree on what counts as human intelligence.

The definition also changes over time. Not too long ago, simple calculators were considered AI, while the term now is associated with a variety of innovative technologies, such as those that power  content filtering  and  endpoint security .

EXPLORE THE TREND:  Here are three ways classroom use of artificial intelligence will grow in 2022.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning: What’s the Difference?

Though not all AI involves machine learning, it is a popular subcategory of the technology. Machine learning refers to machines that process vast amounts of data and also have the capacity to get better at it the more they “learn,” Zimmerman says.

“You can train models with machine learning to improve things. An example is speech-to-text technology,” Tholfsen says.

“Machine learning needs a lot of data to train it to look for patterns and understand what it is looking for. The more data, the more refined or accurate the results. The results, though, are only as good as the data included,” Zimmerman says.

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How Can AI Be Used in K–12 Education?

AI is already playing a role in many classrooms and has promising benefits that can be integrated now and in the future.

Intelligent tutors:  What if an AI program could play the role of a teacher or coach, leading students through lessons and even motivating them?  Nancye Black , founder of the Block Uncarved and project lead for  ISTE ’s AI Explorations program, says AI can support learners in a variety of ways. As a Columbia University researcher, she’s exploring how avatar interactions impact students. “There is some really promising research around the use of AI agents supporting girls and students of color, who are able to — in a lower-risk situation — ask for help and have social learning, even when they are learning independently,” Black says.

Reading workshops:  If educators could host reading workshops around the classroom with each individual student, they would. Instead, AI-powered products such as  Microsoft’s Immersive Reader  can help educators focus on improving education for the 1 in 7 learners who have a disability, Tholfsen says. The product uses text decoding solutions to individualize instruction.

Michelle Zimmerman Classroom Teacher, Researcher and School Leader, Renton Prep Christian School

Translation capabilities:  Translation technology is improving quickly, and these tools include more dialects and language nuances every day. A teacher in New York, for example, used AI technology to host a virtual parent night for families who speak multiple different languages, Tholfsen says. Microsoft Translate allows the teacher to generate a code, which broadcasts to everyone connecting to the stream. It translates the speaker’s language into listeners’ languages without the necessity of a human interpreter. “Listeners can type or speak back in their languages, and it cross-translates, so when you type back in Spanish, it goes to me in English, translates to Mike in Italian, and to the person speaking Arabic or Chinese,” Tholfsen says. “It’s like the  Star Trek  universal translator.”

Low-vision accessibility:  Accessibility checkers are helping educators increase access for low-vision students . “We use AI and computer vision to identify what is in an image and generate a caption,” Tholfsen says. “It’s a massive timesaver to do auto-captioning on images, so people are much more likely to make their content accessible.”

The implementation of AI tools won’t replace educators but will instead help them save time. The tech can be customized to fit any classroom, putting educators in control of the AI tools — not the other way around.

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