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

Hello! Welcome back to Teacher's AIed, where we cast a vision for the possibilities of Generative AI in Education more boldly than a high schooler leaping onto the cafeteria table to ask his crush to the school dance with an impassioned poem they may or may not have written with the help of Generative of AI.

Putting Personalization in Student Hands

Remember our exploration of Generative AI in customizing lesson plans? We’ve previously written about opportunities for teachers to use AI to personalize learning for students.

In this newsletter, I want to propose the next jump: students using AI for personalized and individualized feedback.

Most of the conversation in this blog and in other resources has been around how teachers themselves can use AI…and justifiably so. We know that teachers can not only leverage Generative AI to save time, but also to take their teaching to the next level.

However, let’s take the personalization idea a bit further — to each student with access to AI tools.

Intrigued? Let's dive in!

A GPT for Each Student

Picture this: You are just over halfway through the school year of teaching 10th grade ELA. Throughout the first semester, students wrote an essay each month (under your guidance) for their writing portfolio. Each student has their own strengths and opportunities for growth — ranging from their thesis to the tone. You offer personalized feedback on each essay, but now that there are a few essays already in their portfolios, it is getting hard to track individual student’s areas of improvement and goals.

You start to feel overwhelmed.

Enter AI.

You had the brilliant idea to leverage the power of customized GPTs to create a personalized writing tutor for each student. You set up this GPT to do a few things:

1. Ask students to upload a draft of the current essay they are working on.

2. Analyze the essay to identify strengths and areas of improvement that align with your rubric or example essay.

3. Serve as a thought partner for students. It should not provide answers for students, rather it is trained to engage students in a socratic dialogage to improve their writting.

For each GPT you provide:

• Specific resources you use when providing feedback (writing style guidelines, textbook pages) to ensure that the GPT provides instruction to students that follows your guidelines.

• A rubric or exemplar of what grade-level writing should look like.

• The portfolio of past student essays.

With these instructions and resources, a personalized GPT could provide incredibly personalized, specific, and useful feedback to students on their writing.

These AI assistants are more than mere generic, automated helpers; they're quite literally learning the specific strengths and struggles of individual students and providing the right next step to improve their writing.

Safety (ahem, Compliance!) First!

While embracing these advancements, it's crucial to address two key safety components: data privacy and legal compliance.

• The information you share with most freely accessible Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, etc.) is not confidential. Teachers must be careful not to upload any personally identifiable information on students (such as student names) into these systems.

• Kids under 13 are not allowed to sign up for ChatGPT according to federal law. Furthermore, for schools to use ChatGPT with students between 13 and 18, schools must receive parental or guardian permission to use it. See this EdSurge article or the OpenAI FAQ for Educators for more information.

As we come to a close, let's take a moment to marvel at the potential of AI in breathing new life into K-12 education.

We advocate for student-centered, learning-focused AI implementations that support, rather than replace, the teacher's role. The goal isn't to replace teachers but to provide them with tools that enhance personalized learning and foster student autonomy.

Class dismissed!

Lewis Poche & Kourtney Bradshaw-Clay