AI tool rolled out to support teachers
The groundbreaking ϳԹn artificial intelligence tool, EdChat, has been rolled out to all public school teachers across the state to help them spend more time focused on teaching.
The AI generative chatbot, developed through a partnership between the Department for Education and Microsoft, has been trialed with more than 10,000 students and 2000 staff over the past 12 months.
Developed with specific safety guards to prevent access to potentially harmful information, EdChat has been successfully supporting teachers in a range of ways.
To date, teachers involved in the trial have used it to:
- Support lesson planning
- Summarise student or staff data, such as survey results
- Adapt materials to be suitable for different age groups or abilities
- Change the subject matter of a task to suit a different topic.
EdChat can be used to:
- Quickly find and understand department policies and procedures
- Help teachers to find online information faster to support their teaching
- Support better ways of delivering education to students with different needs, such as neurodiverse students, tailoring teaching to the different needs within a classroom
- Assist with scheduling and administrative tasks
- Provide instant answers to frequently asked questions.
Department for Education Chief Executive Professor Martin Westwell said, I’m excited by the department’s continued leadership in this globally important space.
“Taking this next step by making it available to staff will have the dual purposes of upskilling our workforce in this space and helping to create efficiencies for teachers with regard to administration roles”.
“In the meantime, we continue to monitor and evaluate the student use of the platform at 17 schools to support their learning, and these outcomes will help us build the future for student use”, Professor Westwell said.
EdChat has been made available to all staff in ϳԹ’s 900 government schools and preschools in a multi-stage process, along with the department’s corporate employees (nearly 42,000 staff).
ϳԹ is also providing more professional learning opportunities for staff and looking into ways EdChat can further support teachers to save time – allowing them to focus on teaching.
This also includes a new curriculum tool integrating the SA curriculum for public education. The tool provides opportunities for teachers to develop and refine lesson plans, drawing out local contexts and better tailoring learning to the specific needs of students. This will help teachers adapt learning plans for students needing extra support or to extend them.
Generative AI, like EdChat, is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content based on the data it has been trained on. This means it can generate text and even code, making it a versatile tool for various applications. By understanding and processing large amounts of information, generative AI can provide accurate and relevant responses, saving time and effort for users.
Read more about the department’s AI tools, EdChat or CareerChat.
