After several department-wide implementations, many teachers have started using AI to teach and enforce certain concepts.
Some commonly used AI platforms include Class Companion, Turnitin and Brisk. While some platforms are free, others are paid for by the school district for classroom use. A potential tool that teachers can use is Khanmigo, an AI-powered tool by Khan Academy that acts as a personalized tutor for students and allows teachers to create Blookets and rubric generators.
However, not all of these AI platforms have proven to be effective in the classroom; some students believe that Class Companion works well in some subjects but not in others.
“I don’t like the increased usage since AI can be inaccurate sometimes. It should not be relied on for grading,” sophomore Sean Tyler Uy said. “There were times in Spanish where Class Companion would be used to grade assignments, and it was inaccurate or offered suggestions that didn’t help.”
To combat this, some teachers have utilized a mix of AI and teacher grading. After initial feedback from the AI bots, teachers see individual feedback, class averages and a summary on how students’ writing aligned with the inputted rubric.
“Grading can get overwhelming, so having a tool that gives students feedback [makes] the initial grading process faster. For something summative, I don’t trust the AI to have full autonomy, so I go back [through] assignments and regrade them using [what Class Companion highlights] to help me decipher the text a little bit faster. Class Companion isn’t good at grading programming, but if students put things into [plain] English [and] respond to specific prompts that don’t require programming, it can still grade those sufficiently,” math and computer science teacher Nick Blackford said.
Class Companion was used this year for the English department’s fall semester Common Formative Assessment (CFA), but the science department has opted to use Google Forms to assess students on the CFA instead.
“[Unlike] wordy subjects like history or English, science doesn’t have many biology questions on Class Companion. If you want to analyze a food web, you don’t see those pictures there. [Physics has tried to use] NotebookLM, and when doing labs, students scan it as a PDF, but the AI [is not] able to distinguish it as well,” biology teacher Pei-Ying Lin said. “Ultimately, the teacher still has to grade it by hand.” Ω
