Technology has transformed numerous aspects of our lives, and education is no exception. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a new era of teaching and learning has emerged. AI tools for education have gained significant popularity, offering innovative solutions to enhance the educational experience for both teachers and students. Here is a list of six AI tools that can transform students’ project-based learning experience.
A central component of project-based learning is doing research. However, doing research requires students to be able to navigate ambiguity, triangulate knowledge, question the material that was found and determine which sources would be better for their investigation.
Project Research:
One such AI research app is Genei, that will search the web for relevant content, offer suggestions to add new sources, crunches the content, offers a summary, extracts a list of common keywords along with all the images inside—and, to top it off, rounds up all the references to other work.
Another research tool that students will be able to use is provided by Google. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) will be able to summarize articles that students are reading on the web. SGE can already summarize search results so that students don’t have to scroll forever to find what they are looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping them out after they have actually clicked a link.
This can be a tremendous help for students because this is the part of project-based learning that most students fail on. Having access to a helper app that can find relevant resources, summarize them for the students and format the references correctly can free up students to focus on analyzing which materials will fit which parts of the project and how to analyze and synthesize everything they learned. All skills that require their executive faculty.
Project-Management:
Scheduling Tasks: One of the most important things in a team project is the ability to manage tasks, prioritize them and follow up on task completion. In the past, well managed teams used the calendar to schedule the tasks of the entire project, but many times got confused how to prioritize tasks and synchronize tasks for all team members. AI builds the entire schedule for the team by synchronizing tasks based on task priorities and it makes following up on task completion much easier. One such AI powered application is Motion, which focuses on project management, helping students keep track of all the tasks they still have to complete. By tweaking each task priority, the student will be telling the AI engine when it should land on the calendar and how to place the other tasks around it.
Summarizing Meetings – Before AI, student meeting conversations were usually lost. AI changed all that and there are AI transcription apps that can turn voice into text, letting students browse it later. This can help students be more present in their meetings and, at the same time, be able to thoroughly analyze the transcription later. One such transcription app is Fireflies, which can transcribe all student meetings, tracking the conversation topics along the way. It has its own bot called Fred that can handle summarizing the meeting’s contents, generating text, and searching through the history to meet students’ queries.
Presenting the Project – Once students have their final essay, they can further use AI to create a presentation based on their essay. Many AI tools can create a presentation based only on a topic. Of course, that will not require student work at all. That is not what I am recommending here. Students can use SlidesAI.io to input their text, choose the total number of slides, and let SlidesAI.io do the heavy lifting of transforming the text into visually appealing slides. Once students have a professionally crafted presentation, they can then use a different AI tool to coach them to present their presentation in front of the class. PowerPoint Speaker Coach feature is specifically designed to evaluate various aspects of a presentation, including pacing, pitch, use of filler words, and other common speaking habits. It allows students to practice in private, and the feedback provided can help identify areas for improvement.
When the learning goal centers around working on a project or solving a problem, students utilize their investigative, collaborative and management skills, and employ their executive faculties, skills that no AI tool can orchestrate for them. However, by using AI, many project assignments that students used to struggle with, can become much easier to perform and free students to focus on what is important–coming up with a good solution or a good product.