AI tools will soon be used in classrooms across England, but the Secretary of Education, Bridget PhillipsonTo a big question that she wants to answer: will they save time?
Attending a hackathon sponsored by education in the center of London last week, Phillipson listened to the developers explained how their tools could compile students' reports, improve writing samples and even assess the quality of the welding carried out by the electrician geniuses of the trainees.
After listening to a developer to praise their IA writing analysis tool as “superhuman”, capable of aggregating all the writing that a student has ever made, Phillipson frankly asked: “Do you know how long he will have saved?”
This will be our next step, admitted the developer, less with confidence.
In an interview with The Guardian, Phillipson said that his interest in AI was less futuristic and more practical. Could the IA tools in class free teachers of repetitive tasks and bureaucracy, allow them to focus on their students and finally help resolve the recruitment crisis that creates English schools?
“I think that technology will have an important role to play in the release of teachers' time, and to release this time, put it in better use with a more face-to-face direct education that can only be done by a human,” she said.
“This is less how children and young people use technology, and more on how we support the staff to use it to offer better education to children. I think this is where the greatest potential exists.
“In the coming years, I want to see the tech integrated into schools, with sustained staff to use the best technology to improve children's results, but also to teach a more attractive career so that people can enter and stay.
“It is not a question of replacing teachers. This is to know how the use of technology can complete the contact in front of a human face which cannot be replaced. ”
Some tools are designed to solve very specific problems. Jessica Leigh Jones, Director General of Iungo Solutions, showed Phillipson and Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, a tool to assess the way students had printed circuit cards for professional qualifications such as T.
Using a digital microscope, the tool can quickly scan dozens of boards and provide comments to students in a fraction of the time necessary for a qualified and experienced electrician engineer – a specialized role in shortage, noted Jones.
Jade Lesh, the digital growth engineer of Iungo, told Phillipson that the tool “minimizes the time spent to mark each work”, and that their tests have found it as precise as a formed human eye.
Time has been time to save Phillipson time for an observation tool developed by Teachscribe, giving teachers of teachers' microphones at the beginning of the year to record their comments on the development of each child – to what extent they play with others or creative – which are then downloaded in a database and compared to the objectives of the curriculum of the beginning of the years.
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The developer, Ewan Dobres, said that it would allow teachers a “phenomenal time” that could be passed with the students because they would no longer have to stop and note each observation.
The other applications exposed in AI offices of the Faculty included tools that would allow teachers to scan and transcribe the manuscript work of students, and to use AI to assess it against national references in English and literacy.
Helen Williams, Managing Director of Inmat Multi Academy Trust In Northampothire, said that his schools were working with a company called Stylus on a writing assessment tool that not only has saved the time, but allowed teachers to define more writing tasks that are a burden to score.
Williams said the use of the AI tool for marking had advantages other than saving time. They “leveled the rules of the game” between experienced teachers and at the start of their career and eliminated the traps that teachers can fall during the evaluation of their own students.
“If you have a 30-year course, you will always score with an idea of” well, it will be fine “. I have taken this unconscious bias and only marks what is there, which could throw certain things that a teacher has not picked up in the past,” she said.
