6 AI-Powered EdTech Developments That Make Teachers' Lives Easier

Contents:

• Merlyn Origin — a multifunctional teacher assistant in the classroom
• Cypher AI 360 — AI course designer
• Markr — a tool for automated grading
• Analytics & Insights — a platform for conducting analytics on students
• AssessmentQ — a tool for conducting and evaluating exams
• Breakout Learning — an assistant for assessing work in small groups

Merlyn Origin — a multifunctional teacher's assistant in the classroom

During the lesson, the teacher needs to solve many problems simultaneously. When explaining a topic, it's important to focus not only on students but also on managing educational materials, such as presentations and digital worksheets. To facilitate this process and minimize distraction from the main activity, the Merlyn Origin AI assistant was developed. This tool helps teachers focus on teaching by automating the management of presentations and other digital resources, significantly increasing the effectiveness of lessons. This multifunctional voice assistant, based on an advanced language model, was developed by a team of researchers from leading laboratories, including IBM Research, Amazon Alexa, and Google Brain. It is an analogue of Yandex's Alice and VK's Marusya, but is focused on educational needs. The assistant can simultaneously connect to a computer and an interactive whiteboard, allowing teachers to use it to execute various commands, minimizing distraction from the learning process. This approach improves interaction with students and makes lessons more effective.

The Merlyn Origin Assistant allows you to perform many tasks using voice commands and a remote control. You can ask it to open a presentation with a specified title saved on your computer, search for information online, answer questions, play a YouTube video, or set a timer. This system is useful not only in the classroom: Merlyn Origin can generate lesson plans, formulate assessment criteria, and assign grades. Thus, it significantly simplifies the process of preparing and delivering lessons, making them more effective.

The developer company operates using the B2S (business-to-school) model, popular in the United States. In the American educational system, each school and school district has the opportunity to independently choose the tools and software for an effective learning process. This allows educational institutions to tailor technology to their unique needs and objectives, which helps improve the quality of education and increase student engagement.

Cypher AI 360 — AI Course Builder

Creating a high-quality, original course is a complex task that requires a significant investment of time and effort. The Cypher AI 360 course builder significantly simplifies this process by using modern artificial intelligence technologies, including ChatGPT. With its help, you can quickly and efficiently develop educational materials, improving the quality of education and increasing student engagement. Cypher AI 360 offers an intuitive interface and useful tools to help you create a unique and professionally designed course.

This program has the ability not only to assemble a course based on the provided materials, but also to generate it with a variety of settings, including:

• Difficulty level;
• Language style;
• Image style;
• Voiceover;
• Gamification elements, and much more.

The designer includes a function for checking the correctness of the neural network. If the program detects inconsistencies, it will offer recommendations for reformulating the text. This function helps improve the quality of content and ensures that information is presented clearly and understandably.

The developers claim that the program automates about 80% of the routine tasks associated with course creation. The remaining 20% ​​of the time will be spent checking and adjusting the course content. Assembling a course using the program takes only 5-10 minutes, which significantly speeds up the development of educational content.

The builder supports 50 languages, including Russian. However, users from Russia may have difficulty making payments, as this is a product of an American company, and payment using Russian bank cards is not available.

Markr - a tool for automated grading

Modern technologies make it possible to create tools that can evaluate student work based on specified criteria and provide detailed feedback. These systems are becoming increasingly popular in the educational environment, as they help teachers effectively track academic performance and identify areas requiring attention. Using such tools significantly simplifies the assessment process, allowing you to focus on developing student skills and an individual approach to each student.

Technology continues to evolve, and more advanced tools have already appeared on the market. One such solution is Markr, an AI service that generates feedback on graded assignments by learning from a specific instructor's work. The system analyzes the style and rigor of assessment, allowing it to accurately replicate the manner in which feedback is delivered. However, the specific AI systems used for this process are not disclosed. Markr exemplifies how modern technologies can improve the educational process by providing students with personalized feedback and enhancing learning.

The Markr service can be used both independently and integrated with LMS platforms used in educational institutions. Not only educational organizations, but also individual teachers can access the service, which allows you to use Markr without the need to connect the entire school.

This service is a useful tool not only for checking assignments, but also for creating questions on the educational material for tests and exams. It also allows you to track which topics from the curriculum have already been covered in lessons, which contributes to more effective monitoring of student knowledge and the organization of the educational process. Using this service can significantly improve the quality of the educational process and help teachers plan lessons.

Analytics & Insights — a platform for conducting student analytics

In traditional schools, class sizes are often large, making it difficult for teachers to track the educational needs of each student. They find it difficult to identify gaps in their knowledge and what topics require additional support. When a teacher teaches several classes at once, the task becomes even more complex. Given the diversity of learning styles and levels, it is important to develop effective methods of individualizing instruction so that each student receives the necessary support and successfully masters the subject.

PowerSchool offers the Analytics & Insights platform, designed to monitor the dynamics of various indicators. This system allows you to create analytical dashboards and forecasts based on available data, helping educational institutions make informed decisions and optimize processes. The platform provides in-depth analysis and visualization of information, contributing to more effective educational management.

The platform analyzes student academic performance and attendance. Based on this data, it generates forecasts about the chances of admission to university or the possible risks of not graduating on time due to poor performance. This approach allows us to identify problems in a timely manner and take measures to solve them, which helps improve educational outcomes and increase the chances for a successful future.

Managers Educational institutions have the opportunity to view information not only for individual classes, but also for the entire educational organization and school district. In addition to the data available to teachers, administration can obtain a forecast of the future number of first-graders and analyze staffing needs. This allows for more effective resource planning and improvement of the quality of the educational process.

The developers plan to soon introduce professional development analytics for teachers. The platform operates on a B2S (business-to-school) model, which implies interaction between businesses and schools. This innovation will allow educators to more effectively track their achievements and plan further professional development.

AssessmentQ — a tool for conducting and evaluating exams

Exams and tests present a serious challenge not only for students but also for teachers. They must not only conduct and evaluate testing, but also develop assignments. These tasks can be effectively delegated to neural networks. In this context, Televic introduced the AssessmentQ platform, designed for organizing and evaluating tests and exams. The platform offers innovative solutions that simplify the process of creating and checking tasks, allowing educational institutions to focus on the quality of teaching.

Teachers are given the opportunity to create a test using a constructor that offers more than 20 different types of tasks. This tool allows you to use a variety of question formats, which allows you to adapt tests to the specific educational goals and needs of students.

• multiple-choice questions;
• open-ended questions;
• text-based questions;
• image-based questions;
• matching and sorting questions.

Images and videos can be integrated into assignments, significantly improving the comprehension of the material. It is also possible to use artificial intelligence to assist in creating assignments. The designer offers additional tools, such as a time limit for completing assignments, which helps improve the effectiveness of learning and organize the process in a more structured manner.

After completing the test, the teacher must publish it, which will make it available to students ready to take the test. These tests can also be integrated into third-party platforms, which expands their accessibility and ease of use.

During the exam, the system closely monitors all student actions, generating detailed reports on the testing process, individual student results, and the completion of all assignments. Although the system is automated and can grade assignments, instructors have the ability to review student responses, including recordings of oral assignments. This provides a complete understanding of exam results and allows instructors to more effectively analyze student work.

This platform offers a variety of pricing plans to meet the needs of both individuals and educational institutions.

Breakout Learning — an assistant for assessing work in small groups

Meaningful discussions in small groups are one of the most effective teaching methods. However, in modern educational institutions, their implementation is difficult due to the large size of student groups. Attempts to organize homework in small groups also often prove ineffective, since teachers are unable to monitor the process and ensure that all participants are actively involved in completing the task. This creates problems for both students and teachers, as the quality of learning can suffer due to lack of student engagement. To improve the effectiveness of group work, it is important to develop methods that allow you to monitor the participation of each student and ensure deeper interaction within the group.

The Breakout Learning project effectively addresses current problems in the field of education by rethinking the approach to group assignments. A team of professionals with academic experience develops scenarios for learning topics, which serve as the basis for further work. An in-house team of instructional designers and creative storytellers transforms these scenarios into interactive digital content, making learning more engaging and accessible. Students receive preparatory materials in the form of podcasts, which are also available in PDF format for easy reading. This approach helps improve comprehension of the course material and fosters deeper student engagement. After studying the materials, students have the opportunity to take a quiz to assess their understanding of the topic. Students are then divided into small groups and join online classes. Classes begin with videos covering the material covered, quizzes or tests, and then engage in active discussion. This approach promotes better assimilation of information and development of critical thinking.

The platform automatically transcribes all statements, made during classes, and simultaneously evaluates participants' performances according to a set of criteria developed by the case author. Instructors can log into the platform and receive a report for each class, which contains detailed analytics of each student's performance. These assessments easily integrate with most learning management systems (LMS).

The project initially focuses on business education, but in the future, they plan to significantly expand the range of disciplines, covering the humanities, natural sciences, and medicine. The developers also emphasize that Breakout Learning includes a library of scenarios, but they are also open to the creation and customization of unique content. This will allow educational materials to be tailored to the specific needs and interests of users, making learning more effective and targeted.

The platform provides access exclusively to educational institutions, not individual instructors. This allows for a more targeted use of resources and support for the educational process at the institutional level.