AI-Powered Tools for Homework Help - 349

Hello there and welcome to today's episode of the Easy EdTE [music] podcast. My name is Monica Burns and I am so glad that you're here to join me today. If you want to make the most of education, technology, aka edte, well, you are in the right place. My goal has always been to help make edte easier and give you ideas you can try yourself, share with a colleague or bookmark for later in the school year. Every Tuesday here on the Easy Edte podcast, you'll hear stories from my time in the classroom, the work I do now with schools and districts, and my travels to different edte events. Get ready for solo episodes where I share some quick tips and stories and interviews full of practical ideas and stories from new guests each month. If we mention something you'd like to check out, make sure to click the link. You'll find it in the episode description or the summary area where you're listening to this podcast. Or you can find every episode and all of the resources we mention by going to class techtips.com/mpodcast or by going to class techtips.com and just clicking on the easyte podcast button at the top of the page. This episode is sponsored by my quick reference guide using AI chatbots to enhance planning and instruction published by ASED and ISTD. It's full of quick tips educators can use, and Amazon almost always has it on sale. Just search for me, Monica Burns, on Amazon to see all of my books and quick reference guides. But please remember that there are two authors named Monica Burns on Amazon, and I'm pretty sure you'll be able to tell the difference between our books. Just head to Amazon, search Monica Burns, and you'll find my quick reference guide, using AI chatbots to enhance planning and instruction. This week's episode is all about tools you can use for homework help that are powered by artificial intelligence. Now, homework doesn't have to be a frustrating experience for students or their teachers, at least not all the time. And when students are sent home with assignments, it can often be helpful for everyone involved if they know where to go for some extra support. Of course, different grade levels, different content areas. What that support looks like will vary. So, in today's episode, I have a handful of strategies, customizable strategies that you can use throughout the school year. Now AI or artificial intelligence can play a powerful role do during the school week. Maybe there's one day where students are trying out an AI powered tool to support their study routines or maybe they're never interacting with AI tools and you are using it to create something special for them. Now using AI for homework help doesn't mean replacing thoughtful assignments or anything like that. Instead, it's an opportunity for you to create resources that can support students anytime they need some extra help. And if you've joined me this past school year, this episode goes live in December. I'm recording it for you just like a week or two before it's almost Thanksgiving. And so, you know, at this point of the year, I feel like I'm already in reflection mode a little bit. I've had the chance to host webinars for educators all over the country. I was just in person with some New York educators in November, just last Friday as I'm recording this. And you know, there's so many ways to leverage AI. And this idea of supporting kids outside of the classroom, creating supplemental resources for them, suggesting a tool they might want to explore, you know, is an area that has come up a few times when talking to educators about making things that they will then go and share with their students. So today we're going to take a look at some tools that you might use, some students may use, and I'm going to spotlight a lot of different ways to use AI for homework help. Really, ones that put you in the driver's seat to make some decisions that are right for your students. And I'll include some links to tools I've written about on the blog and some prompts you can try out in the show notes for today's episode. That's true for all episodes, right? I've got a landing page on my website that'll take you out to some extra resources. So, as you're listening, if you're like on the move or on the go or you're listening on speaker and you're folding laundry, I know that sometimes when I'm listening to podcast and your hands are full, right? Know that you can always go back to the episode landing page or you can send me a DM on Instagram or reply to my Monday newsletter. I look at all of those emails as soon as they come through and you can always say, "Monica, what was that thing?" and I'll get right back to you. So, let's get into a handful of classroom friendly strategies that can make after school assignments a bit more streamlined [music] with that help from AI. First up is to create review podcast students can replay. So, one fun way to extend learning beyond the school day is by creating some audio content students can explore. And it's not about you making your own podcast at all, right? It's about generating some audio overviews. Now, creating a quick podcast for them to listen to is a great way to share new vocabulary, right? Or have content explained aloud for students. Brisk Teaching is a tool I featured on the blog. I did a post in partnership with them earlier this year and they have a new feature, newish feature. It's been around for a couple months I guess where you can generate audio content using your lesson materials. So you might have a chapter of a book, you might have a article you found online and you press one button and Brisk will create an audio overview that kind of sounds like a podcast. Now, I believe the free 3month trial for my readers and listeners is still live. I'll link that out for you. They gave it to me over the summer. I think it'll still work for you. So, make sure to try that out. You can do a lot with it for free, but if you want to try out the premium version, I've got that special link for you. Next up is to offer some instant writing feedback for students. This can help them review their previous work, see your suggestions, and use that to study after school. So, students often need feedback before they really feel confident about submitting an assignment. This is true for homework, too. So, because of course, you can't, you know, do all the things all the time as much as you would want to, you might want to check out class companion. I did a post on my blog in partnership for them, too. Super useful tool. I was at their booth at I think it was TCE last year, FETC or TCA. Sometimes it's a bit of a blur. And so it's a really helpful tool that you can use for homework assignments, long-term writing projects, and it can even help kids, you know, build some independence and know that they'll get some quick instant feedback that of course you could refine or go a bit deeper with them later. Now, if you are in a googly environment, you know, some students, all right, might have Google tools they already love, you can use Google AI tools for content review, too. So, if your students are visual learners or or maybe they respond better to music and rhythm, Google has two AI tools that address kind of both of those learning preferences. So, I had a post, I guess it went live last year. I've got it right here. Let me double check for you. Oh, no. It went live earlier this year in January. So, it's been almost a year where I shared nine AI tools from Google that I think are worthy of taking a peek at. And one I shared was Image FX. The other was music FX. Now, Image FX lets you create some custom visuals that can help explain vocab, maybe a scientific process. All right, you name it. And music FX lets you create music that connects to a tone or a topic. Great for helping, you know, anchor a learning experience with some extra emotion for students to help it be memorable for them. Now, sometimes when we think about homework help, we conflate it with test prep, right? Sometimes we're studying for a test or helping students, right, study for a test and that's part of the homework or or after school assignment. So preparing for a big test can certainly feel overwhelming for students, especially if they're not sure where to start. So I did a post on my blog in partnership with Tascadia again earlier this year and they gave me some link for some free stuff that should still work for you all too. I'll put it in the show notes. and they have a gamified test prep tool. So, you can build personalized quizzes, interactive practice activities, review tools, and it's a really great way to tailor your test prep material to your students unique needs. So, this is kind of our our next one on the list, right? Supporting test prep with AI. But following this one, right, you could also do something kind of like this, making review games, for example, with the help of a chatbot. And I use chatbot as like an all-encompassing term for Gemini, chat GPT, perplexity, you name it. And if your kids really like, your students really like interactive experiences, you might use a chatbot to create a custom review game for them. So, you can use, you know, really any chatbot to do this. And once you've chosen the one that fits your needs, you can prompt it to create vocabulary games or review questions tied to your current unit. You can even add in like copy and paste or type in or upload an overview of what it is that you want um reviewed kind of like if you already have a piece of study material and use that as a reference and it can create something for you. So plenty of options. Another tool, this is one that I shared I think twice this fall. They have a lot going on, which is Kira. K I R A. You can build study guides with Kira and you can use their AI tutor. I did a blog post where I talk about ways to use it and I did one spotlighting their AI tutor. I took a look at it as both a student and as a teacher with a blog post and partnership with them and it's really impressive. So, first you might just use it simply to create some study guides. Great for homework support or you might introduce it to students if you're using their platform for a course that you're sharing with students and then that would be a really great way to have AI just answer questions for them. They can go there if they're, you know, not sure of a vocab word. super duper useful. Now, circling back to chat bots, you might have it create an interactive resource that you use in the classroom and then let students take to use outside the classroom. One of my favorite quick things you can do that really gives you some bang for your buck is making a reader theater to practice content. A reader theater is a fantastic strategy for bringing content to life. And you're basically making a script with some roles, acting out. So students are reading it. They don't necessarily have to be on stage, right? They're reading it and they're interacting with content, you know, in a little bit of a different way than say reading a textbook. So you might do this to review science content, historical event, characters from an from a novel, right? You name it. I have a step-by-step guide for this on the blog that I'll link out to, but basically, you're asking for a script at a certain reading level with a certain number of roles around a topic. And you can even add the sentence at the end that says, I want students to understand, you know, whatever the objective is by the end of them performing this reader theater. It usually makes something pretty great. Of course, you can go in and refine and customize if you want to as well. Next up is a musical twist. Again, I mentioned music FX before, but you can actually create review songs with lyrics. So, not just the instrumental version, the music FX, but with lyrics using Sunno, S u N O. If you've seen me keynote before, I often share, you know, a song that brings parts of a cell, like the mitochondria, to life. you know, through music and you can create your own with Sunno. So, there's, you know, kind of something magical about hearing, you know, your your song come to life. And if you're not feeling like you could compose something on your own, this is a great option for making something catchy, maybe cringy, but definitely memorable for students. So, a very creative way to share those review materials that go beyond just a flashc card, goes beyond just, you know, a worksheet for students. Now, the last one I'm going to share with you takes kind of a creative spin, right? It lets you make something that might seem a little light on the surface, but can definitely help reinforce some vocab. And that's designing a coloring book page for the concept review. You can do this with Padlet TA, with Adobe Firefly, with a chatbot if you have the image option enabled, right, to create an image. And this could be a really low stress, high impact way to review content. So once you're in those spaces, you simply ask for a coloring book page that brings a key term, a process, or a scene to life. You can print it out so that you have the PDF version. I've printed out plenty of my little one is too little for for crayons and markers right now, but my nieces love custom coloring book pages. I make them all the time and chat GPT for them. But of course, you could use this to reinforce vocab, right, for so many different reasons. I've got some resources I'll link out to on the show notes that go through this as well. So, a few final thoughts as you're considering, you know, what you might do here, right? Don't do all of the things we talked about in today's episode, but, you know, pick one or two and and see what what fits within your workflow. There's so many ways you can integrate AI into your teaching practice. And I've put oodles of resources on my site and picked a few related to today's episode that you will find in the show notes. So, let's make this edtech easy with a few key points from today's episode. Create podcast, psalms, or coloring book pages with AI to extend [music] learning. Use AI tools that give instant feedback and create study guides. Build review games and quizzes with the help of a chatbot. And teach students to come back to your supplemental resources when [music] it's time to review. Remember, you can find the show notes and the full list of resources from today's episode by heading to easyedtempodcast.com [music] and finding today's episode, which this one is number 349. This episode is sponsored by my quick reference guide using AI chatbots to enhance planning and instruction published by ASCD [music] and ISTY. It's full of quick tips educators can use, and Amazon almost always has it on sale. Just search for me, Monica Burns, on Amazon to see all of my books and quick reference [music] guides. But please remember that there are two authors named Monica Burns on Amazon. And I'm pretty sure you'll be able to tell the difference between our books. Just head to Amazon, search Monica Burns, and you'll find my quick reference guide, Using AI chat bots to [music] enhance planning and instructions. Thank you for listening to this new episode of the Easy EdTE podcast. I love creating new episodes for you each week, but I [music] could use a bit of help spreading the word about the podcast. Can you leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app? Spotify will let you tap on [music] the stars and Apple Podcasts will let you tap on the stars and leave a one or two sentence review. [music] Thank you so much for taking this extra step. It helps other educators find episodes like this one when they're searching [music] for edtech tips.