Educ-ai-tion for all
Education and AI
May 13 is The Day of AI with its own curriculum for K-12 students and their families. AI is already part of many tools students - and educators - use. Grammarly, Hemingway, Chat GPT have already become tools in the educational content creator’s toolkit. What’s next?
Focus on the process
The AI entering classrooms today in the form of Khan Academy tutors, lesson plan generators and customisable chatbots is a tool to solidify and enhance the learning that is already taking place.
Visit any project-based learning class and you’ll see students’ excitement as they acquire new skills, discover how something works, or realise how they can apply their existing knowledge to put their own spin on a project. AI is not a substitute for this joyful learning, but it can help build on the experience.
Study buddy
An AI tool can be an educator’s co-coach to help students practice skills or guide to help them to dive deeper into their learning. For younger students rote-learning times tables, spellings or world language verb conjugations, the AI tutor is a patient one-on-one tutor, always ready, infinitely on task.
For older students, an AI trained to reply in the style of an author or a character from a work of fiction can provide a new perspective on a text. By treating the text in this new way, the AI helps us hone students in the 4 C’s of 21st century learning skills - communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. AI ethics is a rich topic for discussion, exploring the impact of AI on their lives already and how it may change education and work in the future.
For educators an AI-powered productivity tool can help create and tweak lesson plans. It can help find new sources or rubric and provide near real-time feedback on homework and practice tests.
AI Literacy and Learning by Doing
The best way for students to learn about AI is to see what they can create with it. In TinkerTech classes, students explore machine learning by inputing data for projects and exploring prompts to help them build products. For an example, check out a dinner conversation starter bot called Cazzy created by middle school student Caz Keller and his father. Cazzy provides topics of conversation at the dinner table. Find out more here.
What AI-enhanced tools are you already using?
What is the learning tool you would want to see created with AI?
Let us know at hello@tinkertechcamps.com
TinkerTech is working with San Mateo libraries this summer to deliver free AI Worshops for Families. Details of these workshops in July to September coming soon via this website.
Claire Comins is the Founder of Kidscontent LLC and TinkerTech Camps with hands-on coding, robotics and entrepreneurship classes and camps for students ages 8-18 in Marin County and the San Francisco Bay Area.