Question: How can AI be used in schools?

Carl Peter Robinson answered on 14 Jan 2024:

Trying to find information you want from an internet search on a web browser has become rather frustrating in recent years, as we are fed paid-for results, adverts, and other irrelevant pages at the top of our search results. AI tools could be applied really effectively here, to help students find the information they want and need in a much more efficient way. This should make any research required of students a lot less daunting and laborious, thereby maintaining students’ focus and momentum as they go about learning a subject or solving an assignment problem. What I would want to see in the output from these AI chatbot tools, which are likely introduced for such purposes, are references to the source materials that a chatbot’s response has been built from. This would provide students with resources to explore further and to check the factual accuracy and legitimacy of what an AI chatbot is outputting.

For teachers, as has already been mentioned, support for the time-consuming work of lesson-planning, as well as a facility to engage students with topics in terms of generating activities to run during lessons, are already being marketed. It could even help break down language barriers between teacher-student dialogues, where the teacher and student do not share the same first language, enabling better communication. Communication and understanding are vital in education.