Week 4 Blog

 In today’s society AI is all the hype and many people believe that it will be the key to a life of  intellectual ease.  This week I was asked to evaluate an AI tool, Magic School, which is designed to support educators. Magic School offers educators support in lesson plans, assessments, IEPS, assignment generators, informational text generators, and more. 

Part 1:

For the evaluation I chose to use the Lesson Plan generator to create a lesson based on Oklahoma 3rd grade Math standard 3.N.2.3. OAS 3.N.2.3 states that you must use strategies and algorithms based on knowledge of place value and equality to fluently add and subtract up to five-digit numbers (). This is a lesson that I have personally had experience teaching for the past several years so I felt like that it would be an easy lesson for me to evaluate. For Magic School, I put in the state standard along with ISTE standard 1.5, as well as the objective listed by the state. Here is the lesson plan created by Magic School. At first glance, the lesson plan does seem pretty good and has great details of all the steps that should be taken to master this lesson. However, as I started looking more closely at the lesson the first thing I realized was I would change the wording for the lesson objective. I never use the state’s objectives with my students because they do not understand that level of speaking. As you can see, Magic School used the same objective as the state, yet I would change the objective to be more on a third grade level such as I can add and subtract up to five-digit numbers with regrouping strategies. Another issue I found with the lesson plan was that I think students will need to build up to this skill. For the opening, I would have students practice addition and subtraction of two and three-digit numbers that would require regrouping. This will allow students to first dig into their prior knowledge of regrouping and practice those skills on a smaller scale prior to introducing the new concept. The assessment portion of the lesson plan tends to be lacking. According to the Magic School lesson plan, the assessment is for students to complete a worksheet where they solve a series of addition and subtraction problems. I do feel that this can be useful, however I like a more formative approach where I could see the students individually work out this type of problem step by step to show mastery. 

In my opinion, this style of lesson plan can be helpful for new teachers and is a great starting point. With some fine tuning of the final product and some small changes educators could save themselves a lot of time using this resource as assistance in coming up with an approach, especially to a standard that may be new to them. I know personally, I have never had to create a lesson plan of this level and with this much details to be submitted to my administration in my years of teaching. However, I do think that this type of lesson plan can be a great guide for teachers to help them through their lessons. I like to use a less detailed version when I write my own plans for the day. 

Part 2: 

For part 2 of this exercise I was asked to choose a tool from Magic School to play with and use it to create an educational resource, and then evaluate the resource the AI tool created. I chose to test out the Math Story Word Problems creator on Magic School to make up 5 mathematical word problems that would use addition and subtraction to determine the value of coins up to a dollar in monetary transactions. This is another Oklahoma 3rd Grade math standard. I gave Magic School that objective as well as told them that I wanted the story problems to have a Pokemon theme and I wanted 5 story problems. The AI tool then created 5 different story problems that required students to do both addition and subtraction in the monetary form to solve. I found this Magic School tool to be really useful. It allowed me to create fun and engaging word problems for my students to solve that would allow them to work on mastering this standard. The reason I found this tool so helpful was that it took a lot of the creative and hard work and dress out of trying to create these types of word problems on my own. I would definitely recommend and use this type of AI tool to teachers who are looking at creating engaging and fun work for their students that will involve problems with topics that are of interest to them. 

Part 3: 

Magic School is a pretty interesting and new engaging type of education resource. I will be recommending it to colleagues who are still in the classroom for creation of materials for them to use within their classroom. However, I don’t know that I would recommend Magic School to be used by students, the main reason being that most are not at the ability to check for sufficient reliability at this point. A concern I see with the use of Magic School is that it does take personal charm away from the creation of assignments and projects. When you are using AI tools you are allowing someone else to do all the creating for you. The benefits of Magic School are easy to see when you use the product, it saves you a ton of time and brain power. This was my first time using any type of AI tool for education purposes and I do see the appeal however, I feel that it takes away a lot of the integrity of my personal teaching. 

https://sde.ok.gov/sites/default/files/2022%20OAS-M%20FINAL.pdf

https://app.magicschool.ai/tools