By  Nandini Ghatak

As 2024 begins, conversations around the prospect of artificial intelligence set to take over all repetitive and iterative tasks seems to be dominating. The possibility of education remaining just a human endeavour, is being challenged. In that context it can be argued that philosopher Immanuel Kant’s notion that “man is only educated by man” no longer applies. 

For teachers like us, this raises not only serious ethical concerns but also makes us reflect on how we need to develop our digital competencies to embrace and transform our pedagogical practices. We must as teachers be open to welcome into our class, an intelligent computational representation to serve as an efficient support system. In a class filled with students of varying capabilities, teachers often struggle to differentiate their teaching-learning approach to suit the needs of every student. 

Is it then a dream come true for us? Amalgamating our teaching practices by using AI as a supporting tool may bring into our classrooms that expert teaching assistant we always wanted but never had! Does that then mean that AI might give us the power to reinvigorate how we plan, design, teach, and even assess students. Not only that, can we be certain that this will help students to enhance their ability to understand better and elevate their learning experiences in the classroom. 

We all know of Chat GPT, a generative AI chatbot that interacts with us conversationally; the responses one receives are dependent on how specific and refined our questions are. Adding to that list:

Another generative AI is Perplexity that allows us to also ask questions conversationally. However, Perplexity has the added advantage of providing us with cited sources that may be used to research further. 

Google Bard, developed by Google, is a useful tool for language understanding and text generation as well. 

Adobe Firefly, incorporated into Adobe Express, and Canva Magic Design help in creating custom images thereby being incredibly helpful if we wish to have unique and engaging visuals in our lessons. 

MagicSchool is extremely helpful since its designed to help overworked teachers save time by automating tasks such as lesson planning and generating educational content. 

Then there is Diffit that allows one to adapt and generate “just right” resources for any topic and then edit and share with students.

We also have interesting applications such as Hello History that allows one to have life-like conversations with historical figures like Cleopatra, Einstein, and Buddha.

If making question papers and assessments seem tedious then one has QuestionWell that supply endless questions so that we can focus on checking whether students have learnt what has been taught. 

However, we need to exercise caution as we contemplate the use of AI in our classrooms. In his Lectures on Pedagogy, Kant argues against the use of equipment that teaches children to walk, because he says that the child is naturally equipped to learn without such artificial aids, and they might be more detrimental than beneficial. In that context therefore, as teachers we must never forget that education needs to remain a ‘relationship’ between the teacher and the student; and we must continue to believe in their capabilities to learn and their potential to improve. The AI in our classrooms can never be more than a supplementary support system; and as long as it does not impair the student’s natural ability to learn and grow, we may as teachers consider using AI tools to improve and enhance the pedagogical process. 

The author is principal of Modern High School International (Kolkata). Views are personal.