Future of education: Classrooms get an AI twist as teachers test tutorbots

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Drakeford knew that «consonant» might be an unfamiliar word to some students. So she suggested they ask Khanmigo, a new tutoring bot that uses artificial intelligence, for help. She paused for a minute while about 15 schoolchildren dutifully typed the same question — «What are consonants?» — into their math software.

Then she asked the third graders to share the tutoring bot's answer. «Consonants are the letters in the alphabet that are not vowels,» one student read aloud. «The vowels are A, E, I, O and U.

Consonants are all the other letters.» Tech industry hype and doomsday prophesies around AI-enhanced chatbots like ChatGPT sent many schools scrambling to block or limit the use of the tools in classrooms. Newark Public Schools is taking a different approach. It is one of the first school systems in the United States to pilot test Khanmigo, an automated teaching aid developed by Khan Academy, an education nonprofit whose online lessons are used by hundreds of districts.

Newark has essentially volunteered to be a guinea pig for public schools across the country that are trying to distinguish the practical use of new AI-assisted tutoring bots from their marketing promises. Proponents contend that classroom chatbots could democratize the idea of tutoring by automatically customizing responses to students, allowing them to work on lessons at their own pace. Critics warn that the bots, which are trained on vast databases of texts, can fabricate plausible-sounding misinformation — making them a risky bet for schools.