Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be gaining more acceptance in education, and the developers of a new AI-powered tool called PowerBuddy hope they've created a way to save teachers time and improve student learning.
Shivani Stumpf, PowerSchool's chief product and innovation officer, said the company's tool could help teachers ease the work of creating new lesson plans. It could also help with other aspects of the education process that eat up time that could be used for other important tasks, Stumpf said.
Stumph said school districts are collecting thousands of data points on students, and the tools her company is developing try to “leverage those data points” to create learning paths.
Related Articles | Companies are increasingly promoting the use of artificial intelligence
“PowerBuddy has already helped educators in 3,000 school districts save approximately 600 hours of instructional time,” she said.
The tool's developers hope it will be useful for lesson planning, assignments, and assessments.
But while AI's potential is huge and promising, education leaders say it can still have serious drawbacks. Some believe that AI technology could produce biased or inaccurate answers because data can be flawed, according to a report from Education Week.
Still, PowerSchool says it is committed to its mantra of responsible AI, and the company says it will prioritize putting in place what it calls “guardrails” around data governance and data security issues when working with sensitive student data.
