The AI Who Taught Me

Many of the best education tools are built by teachers. Thomas Thompson was teaching middle school social studies when he and a colleague started building Eduaide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three years later, their small team (including a co-founder who still teaches full-time) has built a tool used by over 800,000 educators. Most education AI tools today are just a directory of prompts, which...

This first teacher interview, we chat with the creator of "Lit with Lins" about her evolution from teacher to curriculum developer to AI advocate. She shared her use of Magic School, Spark Space, and We Will Write, as well as some pitfalls such as her experience with AI tools that are blocked in her school. Check out Lyndsey's site and her teacher resources: https://litwithlyns.com/ Reference to t...

Calling all teachers! I would love to interview you about your experience using AI in the classroom - please visit https://www.theaiwhotaughtme.com/stories to sign up! -- Have you ever sat with a child who is learning to read? It's fun to listen to them sound out the words and offer gentle pointers to help them along their way. But up until recently, most edtech software couldn't do that: they jus...

We dive into the recently announced learning modes from the big three LLM vendors:  ChatGPT released Study Mode, but seems to have killed it since Gemini now has Guided Learning as well as a paper showing its effectiveness compared to others Claude has two learning styles - Explanatory and Learning - which offer two ways to learn about a topic. But the interface is quite confusing. We also discuss...

We look into the results from Alpha School, a private school in Texas that claims to use AI to help students gain 2x in only 2 hours a day. When I dug in, I saw that their main "whitepaper" is reporting results based on using the wrong column from the NWEA MAP data! They haven't had any independent verification of their claims, which calls into question their validity. I'm still quite intrigued by...

Writing feedback is a particularly focused use of AI in education. All the major AI education tools help improve writing, including MagicSchool, Brisk, Eduaide and more. But even with the immense power, there's a tension: how do you help students learn to be better writers without just doing it for them? In this episode, we talk with David Vinca, the founder of the Sage AI Writing Tutor , which ha...

There has been a lot of drama and misinterpretation about a recent study preprint put out by MIT - Your Brain on ChatGPT. In this episode, we will look at that study in more detail, as well as a few others that have received less attention but I think do a better job of telling us how to use AI to teach writing. We begin this episode by looking at a recent MIT pre-print, Your Brain on ChatGPT - pr...

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, several AI education companies have sprung up to help teachers use these new tools in their classrooms. MagicSchool, founded by Adeel Khan, has been used by over 5 million teachers around the world. Meanwhile, Brisk Teaching has been growing fast and has over a million teachers using their extension as well. These new platforms are the way that many teachers en...

Using LLMs can seem like a safe bet - but they have biases built in at every stage of the process. In this episode, we'll talk about how bias sneaks in and look at some studies that detail how LLMs are trained and how to watch out for and correct bias in an educational context. Notes: Follow up on the Tutor CoPilot study from the first week: https://lukeshepard.com/blog/preregistration-of-outcomes...

There has been a lot of discussion about a recent article in NY Magazine, titled Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College . It contains many anecdotes about the nearly omnipresent use of ChatGPT and other AI tools on college campuses. Even two years ago, a survey found that nearly all students had used ChatGPT in some form, and the use has just expanded. "Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but...

In this kickoff episode, host Luke Shepard and his AI co-host Emerald dive into how AI is entering classrooms. We will be looking at how AI is used in classrooms, starting with some recent research out of Harvard, Standford and Penn.   Studies We look at four studies published in the last year: Pew Research study on use of chatbots in school. About a quarter of US teens have used ChatGPT for schoo...