Week 4 - Trying Out the Magic School AI Tool for Teachers

Trying Out Magic School

Magic School (https://app.magicschool.ai/tools) is an AI tool that is designed to help teachers with a number of teaching tasks, including creating lessons, drafting emails, and creating images (like the AI-generated image I made to illustrate this post). To try it out I signed up for a free account (which gave me a free 14-day trial of the “plus” version) and used the lesson creation tool to create a Geometry lesson on transformations that also addresses the ISTE technology standard 6.1.c Models and Visualizations. You can see the lesson it gave me here.

I notice that this lesson plan uses the California State standard I entered as the objective (G-CO-2), but cites two different, but related, standards as the ones it addresses (G-CO-5 and G-CO-6). Although the lesson plan has some good ideas, it talks about using assignments or assessments but doesn’t provide any of them. It’s rather vague on the specifics in general. For example, it says to introduce transformations with a real-life example (which is good), but it doesn’t give any examples or suggestions of an example to use. It says: “Demonstrate how to use transparencies and geometry software to represent transformations” but does not suggest a geometry software tool. It says to give students a practice assignment but doesn’t provide that either. The assessment is similarly vague. It says, “Students will create a digital visualization comparing a transformation that preserves distance and angle to one that does not. They will explain their reasoning for each transformation choice.” That’s not a bad assessment idea, but as a teacher, I would have to do some work to create that assessment in a way that was accessible and understandable to students. Overall, the lesson is not bad, but I would have to add a lot of materials and details to it before I could actually use it, so in this particular case it doesn’t seem like much of a time saver.

From what I have seen so far, it doesn’t look like this tool would create ready-to-use lesson plans, but could be a good tool to use if a teacher was stuck for ideas, and wanted a basic framework of a lesson that they could build on. There are also several different tools for creating lesson materials.

Trying Out Another Tool on Magic School

I decided to try out the worksheet generator tool since the lesson it had created for me didn’t come with a practice assignment. I put in the same standard as the prompt and chose the option to export the worksheet to Google (a “plus” level feature, I think). This was the result: worksheet. It’s on the whole a very traditional kind of assignment. I like the fact that it has a mix of questions, including fill-in-the-blank with a word bank, multiple choice, and some more open-ended questions. It wouldn’t be a very good fit with the lesson I created above, since that required students to model transformations, but it could be useful as a review/ reinforcement of the ideas at least, and it's editable, so a teacher could customize it as needed.

Reflection About Using Magic School as a Teacher

I have only just scratched the surface here of the tools that Magic School has to offer (around 100, with more being added all the time). Another is their song generator. I just had to try that out by creating a song about trig functions (I just put in what SOH, CAH, and TOA stood for and it wrote the rest of the lyrics). There are so many other tools, including report card comments, a rubric generator, a standards unpacker, a tool where you enter an assignment and it will make it more AI resistant, an image creator, a tool to make questions based on a YouTube video, a Jeopardy review game maker. There are tools to write social stories for expected behavior and behavior intervention plans. There is even one that will create teacher jokes. I think that if teachers were creative and used their judgment they could use this tool to enhance their lessons. They could also use it to make “cookie cutter” assignments that “drill and kill” though. It depends on how you use it. It was fun to try out, and I definitely want to share this resource with other teachers I know. You can do quite a lot on there for free, and I know that will be one of the big benefits. A challenge could be that you may spend a lot of time playing with it without quite ending up with what you need for your actual teaching…