How Can AI Be Used in Education?
AI in schools can create an opportunity to make teaching and administrative tasks easier so educators and admins can focus more on engaging directly with and supporting students, staff, and other stakeholders.
Attendance Taking
Administrators and office staff can use AI to help track student attendance, keep record of when parents report known absences, or notify parents about unplanned absences or tardiness. By automating attendance taking, admins and office staff can divert their attention to more important tasks such as providing necessary help for teachers and students throughout the day or for visitors or others who contact or visit the school.
Essay Scoring
Teachers can use AI systems to go through students’ essays and check for grammar, sentence structure, and plagiarism. AI can also see if students accurately understood their assignments and if they correctly wrote about the prompt that was given to them. Instead of countless hours meticulously going through pages and pages of essays, teachers can have an AI system take a first pass at each essay before doing their own review, giving them more free time to work one-on-one with students or on other necessary tasks.
Student and Class Comprehension
Teachers already have some options for automatically determining student scores on tests, depending on the test-taking method. AI systems can help teachers further identify general comprehension of certain subjects. For example, with AI-driven insights, teachers could quickly get a sense for how well students or a class understood topics based on individual and collective scores on assignments and tests. Teachers could then use this information to identify if they need to address those topics again in class or personalize student learning in some way based on individual knowledge gaps. Similarly, this information could help administrators and district employees determine if such topics are generally understood across classrooms and other schools, informing curriculum changes or identifying where enhancements are needed.
Real-Time Notes
AI systems can also help students with visual or auditory impairments by recording lectures and using speech-to-text technology. Additionally, if students have trouble focusing in class because they’re busy trying to take notes, AI could be used to create a transcript synced with an audio recording of the class so students could go back and listen or read what a teacher said at a specific moment. This also frees up time for teachers, as they don’t have to provide students with their own lesson recaps and notes.