Playtime with AI – You’re Invited!

When you’re learning something new, you deserve time to play and explore in a supportive environment. Generative AI (artificial intelligence) tools in education are still very new and constantly changing, so the statewide digital learning team is hosting AI playgroups for ABE teachers and staff. We’ve been meeting on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 1:30 pm CT. Can’t make that time? Please suggest a better one here. You can also explore our Resource Padlet.

Our September meeting focused on MagicSchool, and you can learn more about that platform here and here. At our October meeting, we looked at Khanmigo, which is built into the Khan Academy website. Khanmigo is free for teachers; learners can try it for free the first month and for $4 each subsequent month (unless a school district purchases a subscription).

Khanmigo and MagicSchool are quite similar, offering numerous tools to assist teachers with lesson planning, generating ideas for class activities, differentiating/leveling instructional materials, and creating new academic content and quizzes/assessments.

However, the two platforms differ in their approaches. MagicSchool’s chatbot, Raina, will rapidly produce content for almost any teaching-related task, revise the entire output, and provide a full transcript of the entire conversation. Khanmigo, on the other hand, encourages you to slow down and request revisions or changes for specific sentences or sections of its output. The full transcript is available, but you have to open it in a sidebar. You may find this helpful, or you may find that it just slows you down.

Khanmigo’s teacher tools seem to have the same philosophy as its tools for learners, which emphasize personalized tutoring and coaching. The website asserts, “Unlike ChatGPT, Khanmigo never gives you the answer. It’s built to help you learn.” Likewise, the Refresh My Knowledge teacher tool will give you a few key details to review, then ask if you’d like to continue learning through a quiz or a conversation.

When I tried Khanmigo’s Discussion Prompts tool and requested a data table and graph to accompany one of the questions it produced, it responded, “I can’t provide specific data tables or graphs, but I can guide you on how to create one! Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow…” I asked MagicSchool to provide the same materials, and it at least generated a data table. (I have not, however, verified the accuracy of the data, and MagicSchool did not cite a source.)

In my opinion, Khanmigo is best for teachers who regularly assign Khan Academy content to learners. Khanmigo’s Class Snapshot tool will quickly analyze your learners’ data. You can ask follow-up questions, such as, “Which students should be celebrated for their work on assignments?”

Khanmigo can also help you make class groups for differentiated instruction and give recommendations for specific content your learners may need next. I wish that other distance learning platforms had similar built-in tools!

Let’s continue exploring AI in adult education. Join us for the next playgroup meeting on November 26!