AI Advocates

S1 E2: Unlocking Magic School AI: Powerful Tools for Educators

• Lisa Dieker • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode of AI Advocates, Dr. Lisa Dieker and Dr. Maggie Mosher explore Magic School AI, one of the most powerful AI tools for educators. They discuss its high privacy rating, its ability to separate tools for teachers and students, and its many features, from joke and song generators to real-world learning connections and IEP goal-writing assistance. Lisa and Maggie also emphasize the importance of using AI responsibly, testing tools before introducing them to students, and ensuring that educators remain the decision-makers. Tune in to hear their favorite Magic School AI tools and how they can enhance both teaching and learning! 

Magic School AI Link: https://www.magicschool.ai/ 

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to AI Advocates. I'm Dr. Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Dr. Maggie Moser.

Lisa Dieker:

And we're excited to be with you from the University of Kansas, and we are today going to talk about Maggie's favorite tool. What is your favorite tool, Maggie?

Maggie Mosher:

Magic School AI, it's one of the best out there right now, because it separates out the tools for teachers and the tools for students, and it has a great privacy rating. It's got a 94% rating right now and in being private and having from common sense. So it's not even just their privacy rating, but it's a standard privacy rating, which is nice.

Lisa Dieker:

So the 6% that's not private and Magic School AI. Tell me what that means, and then I'm going to share because it's one of my favorites too. I'll share a couple of my tips, and then maybe you can share a couple. We'll go back and forth. So listen to that steady, because there's a lot of fun coming.

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, so what we know about AI and the stat 6% that we don't know is there is information that goes to a cloud that we don't know if we can ever get back. And that's in all things. That's not just an AI, that's in most of tech, but AI is a little bit even trickier, because it's we've got generative AI, which continues to add on. And so the original information, will we ever pull it back in its original state? We don't know if we can. So there's some things about AI that we just don't have knowledge of yet, and that percentage is that piece where, yes, we can say we put all these safeguards in place. We can say that there's no way privacy is going to get anywhere. We can say that no student name is going to go anywhere. We can say your information is just on your computer. But there's always that chance which I think everyone has to be aware of.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, so yeah. And I think I love what you just said, student names. Like I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever put a human's name in my search. I'm like, I am looking for a wonderful colleague who works at the Achievement Assessment Institute who really likes AI, can you write me, you know, a paragraph about things I should write in her recommendation, or whatever it might be that I'm doing? Yeah, and so Magic School AI, you know, does give you, like, put students name here, but that doesn't mean you insert the student's name. So I think a couple of my favorite things. I love everything about it, but I'll start with my two favorites, and then I'll let you go. Is I love the joke ones. I taught middle school first and, you know, middle school kids are like, "Ah, your jokes are terrible," but I love them because they are terrible in Magic School AI. No offense to the creators, but they're truly good teacher jokes, and you can level them by grade level. I use them in my college class, so I don't think it matters the age. And then I'm really excited. I was just talking with one of my friends, who's a FBA/BIP specialist for the district, and she was just talking. She's a coach, how frustrated she is in novice teachers. And I showed her the FBA and BIP, she goes,"First of all, that's crazy." And she said, "Second of all, the recommendations are beyond what even I would have thought of and I've been doing this for 20 years," so it's a good example of that. What we talked about augmented intelligence that it didn't take away from the richness of her background as an FBA and a BIP specialist. It just added layers to her intel, but those are two my personal favorites. What are your favorites? Because there's so many.

Maggie Mosher:

There are so many. So I'm going to go through a few quick ones, not in-depth, but my favorite one being Real World Connections and Make It Relevant. I think for anything we're teaching, you can plug in anything, and it'll give a connection to that community, to that student. And I love that. I also love the Prompt Assistant, because a student can go on the student side and use the prompt assistant, and they'll put in any prompt that they're thinking, and it'll give details as to how that prompt could be better and is this what you're really looking for? And then it'll talk about why it added those things to the prompt and how what the results will be with this prompt versus the original prompt. And I love that, because the better the prompt, the better the output, really.

Lisa Dieker:

What else? Anything else in there you like?

Maggie Mosher:

Oh, Song Generator, the Rap Battle.

Lisa Dieker:

One of my favorites.

Maggie Mosher:

Love those because

Lisa Dieker:

I can't sing. I wish it would sing for you. It doesn't. It just gives you the song. But I've had some students sing that are good at singing when the song comes on. What else? What else do you love?

Maggie Mosher:

We've used Presentation Generator a good amount, and I use Email Responder pretty frequently. It gives some great examples and suggestions of things maybe you don't think about especially I'm so busy when I'm emailing that when it comes back to me, what I like about it is I forget to answer certain questions that are in the email, and it never does. So I can change my answer, but then I always make sure I'm answering everything, which is nice because it slows me down a little bit, and that personalized feedback and project-based learning. It's really good at providing projects based on standards, and I know we've used it a lot with like the Presentation Generator. Would we ever use the final presentation? No, but it's a good way to start prompting to make a presentation for students as well.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I know that, you know, there's a free version, and our colleague Jamie Basham says it better than anybody that if you're not paying for the product, you are part of the product. So that's the 6% that goes in the cloud. And so, you know, again, it is free there. You can only do five slides, but there's so many things there that I think it's a great place to learn and get your feet wet. And the same with your students. And then the last comment I'm going to make about it is, I really think it, itwrites good IEP goals. And some of you are going to be like, "Oh she just disgraced individualized education programs all across the country by saying that." But I will tell you, as a parent of a kid with disability, I saw some pretty bad IEP goals, and what I love is you could generate them at the meeting. I have a team that's doing that, and let the parents look at them together and then add to the prompt. Like, we want more things about the kids, favorite preference of bears, or, you know, we'd like less writing or more of and so we can prompt it to get it where we want. But the SMART goals that are written there, just please never, ever, ever, in America,let me see an IEP goal that says, "Insert students name here. Put on an IEP." that is my greatest fear is that you don't trust it. It. You are the intelligent agent. It is just the agent creating something to make your time, save you that time and money, because you really can do this for free. Your last thought Maggie?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, and I, I always think of it too, as an assistant like it's only as good as good as you train it to be, and you're always checking over an assistant's work because they don't have your knowledge, they don't have your understanding. So you have to check and you have to make the final product, but they can help you with the little stuff along the way. And I think what of one of the things I love about Magic SchoolAI is I used it with 120 students in five states, middle schoolers, and I used the social narratives part of Magic School AI and I used a teacher who's been trained in social narratives versus the social narrative school version. And actually, the students did better with the social narrative little prompt chatbot than they did with the teacher who's really trained. And I think a lot of that had to do with they weren't afraid to ask it questions. They weren't afraid to be wrong. They weren't afraid to ask ridiculous things to it. We do talk about to the students all the time, no personal information, nothing that can tie back to you, but you can ask it anything. And what's nice about Magic School AI is it's not going to give you any inappropriate information. It has a lot of safeguards there, but it is going to give them some ideas, and a lot of those ideas are evidence-based. They have a lot of social narratives behind them, a lot of role playing. And so the information they were getting back was good quality information, and they were able to take that information, as opposed to someone generating it for them, that's a person, and them being nervous about it.

Lisa Dieker:

And I think that last, my last comment, which was a great statement you made, is, you know, let kids use it, but again, use it yourself first, because you have the adult guardrails, and then go in the student mode as the teacher, pretend like you're a student, and go, no, no, I don't. I'm not ready for that, or whatever. Again, your comfort level, but what we're telling you is, put your toe in the water, and we think Magic School AI is a great place to start to swim. So thank you for joining us, and if you have questions, send us a Tweet at AI Advocates, and we'll have that link provided at the bottom of the podcast. Thanks, Maggie.