Reflections on Accelerate EdTech Impact Summit 2024
Some reflections on use of AI in education after attending the Accelerate EdTech Impact Summit 2024.
Dream Day, one of the tools in the student pitch competition, was developing a tool to coach students in their interests, skills and goals. It does this by using activities and questions designed to help students self-reflect. I wonder if this could be a way to help give students the same kind of support and coaching I’ve seen in observing great afterschool robotics teams. Could it act as a coach in a similar way by prompting reflection, and could it start to learn the student’s motivation and interests over time? Journify was another tool that used AI for personalization, which it did by giving the model context on the student’s past performance and needs.
Another interesting demo was LearnLM from Google. It gives prompts for students to select and incorporates “stop and think” moments in the response. The presenters noted that this was based on textbook design, which was how it read. They talked about tools for metacognition and the ability to generate interactive diagrams. The interactive diagrams might be really interesting as a way to sketch out ideas, either for creating a product or for trying to understand a phenomenon. The interactive visuals could help the student experiment with the idea even if they don’t fully understand the concept, but only if the model was able to generate an accurate physics engine (or whatever is needed). The idea of metacognition is good, but I don’t think the “stop and check” moments get there. It’s not interactive enough and it’s frankly a little boring.
MagicSchoollooked very interesting and relevant for its use of AI and autonomous teaching agents. They have a goal of focusing attention on higher-level thinking, student voice, and student creativity.
Finally, I was inspired by Professor Bryan Brown’s challenge to create tools that make you want to get up and engage with the real world, as well as these “headlines from the future” from the d.school exercise:
Hands-on learning
Free or affordable
Co-designed with teachers and students
Tested and improved with students
Increased access to resources
Culturally and linguistically relevant
Able to give and get real-time feedback
Able to provide measurement
Connection / collaboration / community
These were the elements we collectively developed as aspects of powerful learning experiences that we want to see in new technologies.