You’re confident that AI will revolutionize the way we work, making many jobs faster and easier for workers — which is why you take the time to help your students learn the skills they need to build and work with AI tools.
So why aren’t you using AI to make your job easier?
As the AI industry grows, developers are creating AI tools and systems to aid teachers in the difficult task of classroom management. Here’s all you need to know about this emerging technological boon and why you should start taking advantage of AI today.
Why Use AI for Classroom Management?
We don’t need to tell you that being a teacher is hard work. According to a survey by RAND, teachers work an average of 53 hours per week — well more than the typical working person. Though most of those hours occur in the classroom, many occur before or after school when teachers perform the less rewarding work of planning, preparation, and management. Though much of this type of work is unpaid, it is nevertheless essential to a functioning classroom, which means teachers cannot simply refuse to do it.
Likely the result of these relentlessly long hours of work, the rate of burnout among teachers is the highest among any profession in the United States. Nearly half of all K-12 teachers feel symptoms of burnout “always” or “very often,” and such a prolonged experience of stress can have long-term effects on overall health. It is little wonder that so many teachers suffering from intense burnout look for other lines of work after just a few years in the classroom.
Most teachers choose this profession because they want to positively impact students’ lives. If you want to continue teaching, you need to use EdTech to save valuable time by automating some of the less desirable responsibilities of managing your classroom.
How Can AI Help Teachers?
There are a few different ways that teachers can benefit from using AI:
Outline Lesson Plans
Having a lesson plan makes it easier to navigate the classroom, but creating lesson plans is hard work — which is why so many teachers reuse old lesson plans year after year. If you want to keep your lesson plans fresh, you might use an AI tool like ChatGPT or Fetchy, which can easily produce lesson plan outlines given information like topic, grade level, and state standards. Then, you can flesh out these outlines with information and activities that are more relatable to your unique set of students.
Personalize Instruction
Different students learn in different ways, and good teachers take the initiative to tailor their instruction to individual students’ needs. Unfortunately, effectively personalizing curriculums takes incredible forethought and effort. You can outsource some of the work to AI.
There are many ways to generate images and even diagrams with AI that demonstrate the topic visually. They can distill complex concepts into an easy-to-read format. Teachers can also use diagram makers to help supplement AI tools or use them in conjunction with those tools to create engaging, imaginative, and demonstrative images.
Communicate With Parents
Parents are your partners in education, but communicating with them can be among the most difficult parts of the job. Fortunately, you can get AI on your side. A variety of AI-driven email response tools are available to help you automatically respond to general questions or requests; these tools can be programmed to provide answers that are the same for everyone, such as information parents could find in the student handbook or class syllabus. You might also use AI to help you draft email newsletters to send to parents regularly to ensure they’re well-informed about what your students are doing in class.
It’s important not to blindly trust the output of AI tools, however. Be sure to spend time humanizing the text it creates, even if you need to use an additional tool to do so. Keep in mind that, though that can be helpful, you do still need to get human eyes on your project.
Grade Assignments
Grading is an endless concern for teachers, and the more involved the project, the more rigorous the grading needs to be. While AI isn’t infallible — teachers know better than most the types of mistakes AI can make when writing an essay, for example — it can be a useful tool for double-checking teachers’ grading efforts. One tool, Enlighten AI, can efficiently provide feedback on student spelling, grammar, sentence construction, paragraph format, and more. This frees teachers up to offer more qualitative assistance on content.
Can You Use AI Safely?
Recent advancements in AI are astonishing, and the more we utilize AI technology, the more effective it can become. However, current AI solutions are not completely without risk. AI tools require significant amounts of data to function; for teachers, some data may be sensitive, such as student names and ages, family contact information, school location, and more. Such information in the wrong hands could put students in danger, now and in the future.
You must use AI ethically to benefit rather than harm students. Be careful to uphold strong cybersecurity at home, at school, and wherever you utilize AI tools. You might talk to school administrators about their network security practices to ensure teacher and student devices are safe from cyberattacks on school premises, and you should shore up your home defenses with encryption, multi-factor authentication, and smart web use. You can also learn more about ongoing developments in AI tools and their ethical applications so you can keep your own activities as beneficial for your classroom as possible.
AI is the future — to include the future of teaching and classroom management. Introducing it to your education workflow lets you teach students more efficiently and effectively. By learning to work with AI tools today, you can become a better teacher for the rest of your career.
