Teach with expert insights on AI, curated by your trusty Teacher’s AIde

Hello! Welcome back to Teacher's AIed, where we simplify AI concepts quicker than a gym teacher can turn a rainy day into an impromptu indoor dodgeball championship.

🏃 Don’t Get Left Behind: Embrace AI, Now!

Last week, we commented on the EdWeek article that reported that 37% of educators have never used AI tools and don’t plan to start using them, and another 29% say they haven’t but plan to start soon. Therefore, 66% of teachers have never used AI!

Like Allison Reid, the Director of Digital Learning in one of the nation’s largest school districts, leaders are beginning to encourage teachers to use AI because “Teachers who use AI may replace teachers who do not.”

States are beginning to offer guidance for educators (like in one of our author’s home states) on leveraging AI. And districts are encouraging teachers to explore using them in the classroom and to teach their students to use them.

Many districts, like Wake County Public School System in North Carolina, are encouraging middle and high school educators to give their students access to AI-tools. Reid, a leader in the district, said, “There’s a responsibility for us to teach our students how to use this well and responsibly and let them use it to move their learning forward.”

At Teacher’s AIde, we’ve advocated creating environments where students are encouraged to make good choices with AI, and we’ve argued that responsibility falls on the teacher to create strong learning environments where students are empowered to use AI as a tool to expand their thinking rather than as a crutch.

🏆️ AI Coaching Your Students to Reading Success

Last week, we received fascinating news from Microsoft: they are making their Reading Coach software free!

This personalized program focuses on one of the more manual aspects of teaching students how to read: fluency.

In my previous life, I was a literacy coach. I remember how tedious measuring fluency could be: we’d set students up with a reading passage and mark every word the student missed, misread, or mispronounced. We had a special code we used to mark the errors students made in their reading fluency. We could assess only one student at a time. When we worked with students, we used special passages for these fluency assessments, and we could use them only once per child; once a child had read the passages, we risked skewing their fluency scores artificially if they remembered having read them before. Further, these passages were as dry (and moldy) as the ancient chicken nuggets discovered in a fourth-grader’s desk at the end of the year. Because the process was so tedious for a full classroom, we generally saved reading fluency assessments for 1-2 times a quarter.

However, with Microsoft’s Reading Coach, students can receive fluency practice each day and personalized feedback to improve words or phrasing they struggle with. Teachers receive reports on how students are growing and areas students need to develop. With daily fluency practice and reports, Reading Coach increases teachers’ ability to assess their students’ reading fluency more frequently.

Another key feature of Reading Coach is the “choose your own adventure” feature. Students can create their own fluency passages by selecting characters and setting. The AI features in Reading Coach will then create a one-of-a-kind reading-level and age-appropriate fluency story. This feature eliminates the need for boring one-time-use fluency passages.

However, this tool has some limitations: it doesn’t measure comprehension. While this tool will help students become more fluent readers, it doesn’t do a great job of measuring their ability to understand what they’ve just read.

In the coming weeks, we’ll put our literacy educator hats back on, give Reading Coach a spin, and report back to you how capable it is as a reading tool. Stay tuned!

📣 Announcements: Premium Posts and “Build a GPT”!

Premium Post: The Case for AI in SPED

On Monday, we released our first premium series and made the first piece free for our subscribers. We will keep this piece free until we release our second premium piece, an exclusive resource for our premium subscribers.

Our first piece discusses the critical role of AI in special education within K12 settings. It highlights the challenges teachers face who often feel unprepared to implement Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) effectively for students with learning differences. By integrating AI tools in the classroom, educators can provide more personalized learning experiences and better meet the needs of these students. We underscore the importance of practical, actionable advice for teachers to incorporate AI into their teaching methods, aiming to enhance learning outcomes and teacher efficiency in managing diverse educational needs.

If you want to keep up with the latest insights on AI in Special Education, plus our other pieces diving into deep AI in K12 insights, and receive special offers and discounts on professional development, become a premium subscriber today!

“Build Your Own GPT” Webinar

Our friends at AutomatED are hosting a "Build Your Own GPT" webinar, a Zoom-based learning experience designed for educators who want to incorporate custom GPTs into their teaching practices this year.

We’ve written about how custom GPTs “allow you to provide specific resources as training data, so the responses it gives you are hyper-focused on exactly what you want.”

The February webinar will give a cohort of like-minded educators hands-on guidance in developing custom GPTs tailored to their specific needs. Whether you're looking to enhance student engagement, streamline course creation, improve your in-class activities, or take back some of your valuable time, this webinar is your gateway to unlocking the full potential of custom GPTs.

By the end of the webinar, you can expect to have learned how to develop your own GPTs — but you will also walk away with one already developed to use right away!

The price is $99 to participate. All Premium subscribers ($5/month or $55/year) get a 10% discount code, which is included immediately below.

Seats are filling up quickly! You can reserve your spot here.

Class dismissed!

Lewis Poche & Kourtney Bradshaw-Clay