Posted by AI for Teacher Retention and Classroom Success
As of this year, 55% of teachers are ready to leave their jobs due to burnout, safety concerns (e.g. COVID-19, school shootings) and financial barriers. These extremely high attrition rates in recent years are, sadly, unsurprising as other helping professionals, like healthcare staff, have also been experiencing a powerful need to leave their jobs since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Just as medical robots have helped support healthcare staff amidst staffing shortages and feeling overworked, AI will do the same for teachers. AI, in the education setting, is often discussed from a student’s perspective, but instead of focusing on savvy AI learning tools, like Duolingo or Socratic, we are going to focus on AI that supports minimizing teachers’ workloads. We will be looking at six startups, within three different categories, that have successfully deployed AI tools that benefit teachers.
At Iterate.ai, we value startups because they are the leaders in innovation. We know that large organizations, including schools and other educational institutions, can tap into the great work that startups have to offer in order to collaborate on cutting-edge solutions for problems, such as teacher attrition rates. We believe in the power of startups so much that we created a platform, Signals, that uses our proprietary AI to track over 16.1 million companies. Using what our Signals platform has tracked, let’s take a look at those 6 AI-based startups that are helping teachers with their workload.
- Digital teaching assistants
- Founded in 2017, Capacity is an AI-powered help desk that allows for a reliable self-service opportunity for students looking to find quick answers to everyday questions. At times, teachers’ email inboxes can be flooded with simple questions, creating more administrative tasks (i.e. responding to emails) and more dread (e.g. seeing 15 new unread emails) in their workload. With Capacity, a teacher can expect students to use this AI chatbot to find answers to, “where can I find the syllabus?” and “what day is the final essay due?”
- Deployed by Merlyn Mind, Symphony Classroom is a voice-activated AI tool that supports classroom management. With an influx in digital transformation in school settings, teachers are expected to learn and adapt to new technologies in real time, and that can be challenging at first. Instead of struggling with smart boards and digital wall panels or wasting time calling IT, Symphony Classroom lets teachers say “switch to HDMI2” or “open powerpoint presentation on geography” for easier access to their teaching materials.
- Grading
- Copyleaks is a startup with multiple AI and ML-driven capabilities that help teachers with grading student assignments. Initially known for its plagiarism detection AI, Copyleaks also uses AI to grade essays based on parameters set by teachers themselves. During midterms and finals season, teachers are expected to grade dozens, sometimes hundreds, of essays, taking hours of outside-of-the-classroom time (i.e. personal time) to complete. With Copyleaks, teachers can rest assured that a non-biased and credible AI system can do the grading for them.
- Founded in the UK, Viper Plagiarism Checker is a leading tool for teachers to use to ensure that students’ essays are honest and not plagiarized. Using Viper, teachers can input students’ essays into the plagiarism checker and see results in less than 30 seconds. The software is user-friendly in that it provides a detailed report and easy-to-read scoring system for teachers to assess the level of dishonesty that may have occurred. Teachers can also rely on Viper’s plagiarism checker knowing that it cross-references over 10 billion sources.
- Document Organization
- Teachers are often filing dozens of important documents every day, creating clutter on their desks and additional stress when trying to find a document they were sure they filed a while ago. With ABBYY’s FineReader AI, teachers can create their own searchable digital library of homework assignments, study materials, reports, student notes, and exam questions. Administrative processes can now be streamlined, and the integrity of sensitive documents can be secured. Additionally, this AI-powered tool aligns with accessibility needs for students with disabilities. For example, teachers can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert their materials into digitally accessible documents for students with visual impairments or dyslexia.
- iScanner offers an “office in your pocket” tool where teachers can share pages from a textbook, add notes to essays, or print homework assignments all from the iScanner app. All data stored with iScanner is protected and secured, offering multiple privacy methods, and complying with GDPR requirements and BBB security protocols. The best part about iScanner is that they offer the PRO version of their tool for free for educators and support staff in the US, UK, France, Canada, and Germany!
The future of education, thanks to AI
We predict that AI will continue to have a positive impact on the education field; specifically, supporting teachers and other education professionals as they continue to navigate increasing demands in the classroom setting. In the US alone, the government has already proposed an “AI Bill of Rights” that will guide schools in their use of AI for educational purposes. Globally, the AI education market is predicted to have a market value of 20 billion USD by 2027. This is all promising news for AI in education; but, teachers are still concerned that they will be replaced by technology. However, we agree with research that reassures teachers that they will absolutely not be replaced, and instead, their jobs will become less about heavy administrative workloads and more centered on what they love– teaching students.
Our low-code platform, Interplay®, is ready to support teachers. Using our platform, teachers can focus solely on teaching thanks to our AI-powered chatbot development (e.g. for answering students’ questions in real-time) and threat awareness (e.g. using AI-based image recognition to identify weapons and call for help.) At Iterate.ai, we are actively seeking partnerships with large organizations, like schools, to offer support with our technology and expertise. For more information, please contact us here.