Key points:
- Teachers shouldn’t be afraid to try AI language tools as part of their instruction
- AI-powered tools can help students write well and revise their writing more efficiently
- See related article: Is AI the future of education?
- Everything You Need To Know About AI In Education
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT several months ago, there’s been an almost-complete panic in academic circles about the possibility (and sometimes, the reality) of students using AI-powered tools to cheat.
As an English teacher myself, but also as someone who’s been interested in the development of OpenAI’s work since my own high school days, I admit that I’ve been rather more excited than worried by this development. AI-powered tools, especially language tools, have the potential to help students write well, revise their writing more efficiently, and even to think about languages in a more sophisticated way.
Here are four AI-powered language tools that I use in my own classroom. While they all have paid options, I’ve found that the free versions work just as well for classroom purposes.
1. Grammarly: Grammarly is, essentially, a leveled-up version of the autocomplete function on your phone. In that sense, it’s not really a dramatic innovation–more like one step further than you’ve already taken in your personal life. In the classroom, it can help students avoid the kinds of typos that are inevitable when typing (for example, this sentence originally warned against inevitable tpyos).
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