There seems to have been a lot of attention to how A.I. can be used as assisting students in their learning by anticipating the best learning path needed. Tools such as Knewton Alta, Dreambox, Smart Sparrow, Pearson Interactive Labs., etc. all have made a buzz and continue to show potential in adaptive learning but there has been limited in its impact to secondary education vertical.
When experimenting with these platforms and listening to colleagues using these adaptive learning platforms, it is exciting with lots of possibilities but it seems to have made limited progress in the Ontario secondary education space. Examining outside of the province, these platforms remain niche and limited in application. As to why? Not sure.... maybe it requires additional time, professional training in online instructional design, and competency in online authoring tools -- all of these factors are not uncommon needs in secondary education.
What ever the reason, for A.I. to continue to impact learning, more resources, accessibility, and refinement needs to take before adaptive learning platforms are adopted more. If it does change, it certainly will be a future post.
Does that mean A.I. is not very present in secondary education? Outside of LMS's adaptive learning management systems that garner media attention, A.I has quietly entered schools in many ways already. Here are some examples:
- Latest generation wireless systems and tools use A.I. to ensure robust connectivity. With the densely populated classrooms, increasing number of wireless devices, and diverse building structures A.I. is used to learn the physical environment, user activity, and seamless changes when encountering outside (rouge) wireless signals.
- Security systems as well use AI to monitor threats, such as Bitdefender EDR and Sentinel One, that scans for abnormal activity online to prevent malicious attacks and data threats.
- Predictive spelling and grammar, as I compose this reflection, I still marvel how spelling, tense, and sometimes the choice of words intelligently are suggested in my writing. Google Doc and many educational apps are so sophisticated now that tools like the once popular Ginger app are not really needed anymore.
- Speech-to-text and noise cancelation technology, software such as Read/Write Gold learns your voice to dictate text additionally software like Krisp, learns your voice in Web Conferencing software so it only captures your voice and not background sounds or those talking. A very handy tool when in room with others in the same room and online meeting. Google Meet and a couple of other online conferencing tools, also have live speech-to-text accessibility tools.
- Smart devices such as smoke detectors and security cameras are being deployed for creating a safer campus for students. These smart devices can monitor and alert administration between everything from concerning high body temperatures and washroom vaping. These devices intelligently scan its environment to prevent tampering as well as learn to recognize high temperatures behind facemasks.
- Grading programs have a niche AI presence as well. Gradescope part of the Turnitin suite of programs, is an adaptive learning system but for the teacher to grade student's work quickly. It analyses Math and Programming solutions into quadrants or levels of student work into groups 1) doesn't understand, 2) approaching understanding, 3) illustrates understanding then the teacher can evaluate each student's answer into these groups. By grouping them this way, it speeds up the marking process for the teacher. If Gradescope placed a student's answer in a wrong group, the teacher can move it and the system will learn.
Comments
Post a Comment