What are the top five AI tools for educators?

Educators at different levels can have varying needs. Issues that an elementary school teacher faces in his everyday work can be entirely different from what a professor at a research institution does. Moreover, the same tool may not be useful to students in different institutions. Students enrolled in a course on communication at Saint Louis Community College may have a different foundation compared to those taking a similar course at Washington University. Without a strong foundational knowledge, the use of AI tools such as chatbots can be ineffective. The outcome of using an AI tool depends on the capability and the knowledge of the user.

At Process Feedback, we value accessibility. Many students and institutions worldwide cannot afford to pay for using tools. Here are some free and highly accessible tools that educators at all levels may find useful:

1. Text Transcribing and Summarizing Tools
Educators and education leaders spend a significant amount of time attending meetings, taking notes, and reviewing meeting notes. Many who are not good at multitasking, struggle every day torn between taking notes and trying to actively participate in the meeting they are in. As a solution, most online meeting tools such as Zoom have features and plugins that allow users to record the meeting, convert a recorded meeting to searchable text, and summarize important topics discussed in the meeting. Although there are some caveats, these tools can be time savers and improve educators' productivity [Abril, 2023].

2. MIT App Inventor
MIT App Inventor is simply an outstanding tool that is free and highly accessible. It is an online platform where anyone can create mobile apps in minutes. Its intuitive and visual programming environment allows everyone, even children, to build fully functional apps for smartphones and tablets.

3. ChatGPT and Gemini
Educators can use online chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini for several purposes. They can be used to create visual metaphors, create rubrics for evaluation and grading, delve into the specifics of literary styles by analyzing the approximation of different authors’ writing, present academic information in the form of comic book visuals, and so on. They can also act as a mentor, coach, tutor, simulator, student, etc. to help both educators and students [Mollick, 2023].

While there are tons of resources on the Internet on how to use these chatbots for creating academic materials, many caution that some of the details generated by these chatbots can be wrong. Hence, it is suggested that these chatbots should mostly be used to ‘enhance' our content, not ‘create' them.

4. Day of AI
For educators interested in learning more about AI and teaching their K12 students more about AI, MIT’s Day of AI program can be very ideal. It is a free, hands-on curriculum of lessons and activities designed to introduce K-12 students to AI. Activities in Day of AI are organized by age group (elementary, middle school, and high school) and are ready to be implemented.

5. Process Feedback

Process Feedback shows a student's work as a visual journey, enabling educators to see the effort, provide personalized feedback to students, and grade faster. This free online platform we developed, aims to solve several problems with one tool. It encourages students to be original and discourages plagiarism, empowers teachers to grade fast, improves students' metacognition, simplifies formative assessment, and makes writing and coding fun and enlightening for students.

Image credits: Subodh Dahal (not AI)