17 AI Tools and Resources for Teachers

Since January anything that I’ve published about AI (artificial intelligence) has vaulted to the top of the list of the most popular posts of the week, month, and year. The rise in popularity and in amount of AI-powered tools since the start of the year could make your head spin if you tried to keep up with all of them.

If your school year is over or nearly over, you might find yourself with some time to start to dive into trying some AI tools. I’ve put together a list that highlights some AI tools that you might want to try. Subscribers to my newsletter got a PDF copy of this list on Sunday.

An Overview of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that will create documents for you based on some minimal input from you. For example, I simply typed into ChatGPT “Ten Canva Features for Students” and got this article. ChatGPT can also be used to create poems like this one about the sunglasses worn by Geraint Thomas. 

With a little tweaking of what you put into ChatGPT you can create longer articles than the one that I mentioned above. A simple, “tell me more” or “what about X” can generate more material from ChatGPT. 

Searching With ChatGPT in Bing

ChatGPT is incorporated into Bing. You can choose to use it or not use it when conducting a search. This video shows you how it works and the difference in results when using it versus not using it.

An Overview of Google Bard

Google Bard is Google’s attempt to rival ChatGPT. Over the coming months it’s going to be incorporated into many of the Google Workspace tools that you’re already using. Here’s an overview of how it works. 

Bard makes it easy to quickly transfer the transcript of your Bard chat into a Google Document. All you need to do is simply click the new export button and then choose “Google Document.” Once you’ve exported your Bard transcript to Google Docs you can then use all of the Google Docs editing and collaboration tools that you’d use with any other document. Watch this short video to see how to copy from Bard to Google Docs. 

Searching for images in Google Bard is easy to do. Simply type something like “images of a happy person with a dog” and you’ll see a selection of about a half dozen images appear. It’s not without flaws. Watch this short video for an overview of conducting an image search in Google Bard.

AI-powered Design Tools

Canva’s Magic Design tool can be used to create a complete slideshow presentation from just one sentence. To be clear, it doesn’t just design the layout of the slides. It populates the slides with text and graphics to support the presentation topic! Watch this video to see how Canva’s Magic Design tool can create a presentation for you from just one simple prompt.

Microsoft Designer is an AI-powered tool that enables users to quickly generate many variations of a graphic design with just a few clicks. The purpose of Microsoft Designer is to give you a gallery of designs based on your input. You can then choose the design that you like best to download and use in your projects. In short, it’s kind of like having a graphic designer present you with a bunch of options to pick from.

Lumen5 is a tool that will produce a video for you based upon your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or submit the text of an article you’ve written. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. The video will always begin with the title of your article. From there it will use any subheadings or section headings that you have in your article to create sections of your video. If you don’t have subheadings or section headings in your article, Lumen5 will attempt to pull the keywords or phrases from each paragraph. Watch my demo below to see how easy it is to use Lumen5. 

Whimsical is a mind mapping and concept mapping tool that has an artificial intelligence component. Whimsical’s AI tool generates concept maps based on any keyword or phrase that you center on the screen. To use Whimsical’s AI concept mapping tool you simply have to start a new concept map, enter a keyword or phrase, and then click the AI icon. The tool will then generate a simple concept map of linked terms and phrases. 

AI-powered Assessment Tools

Edpuzzle is a tool that I’ve used for years to add questions to videos that I’ve made and videos that I’ve found on the web. Edpuzzle’s Teacher Assist feature will automatically generate questions that you can add into the video assignments that you give to your students. With just a click you can have multiple choice and short-answer questions added to videos you’ve made and videos that you’ve found online. Watch this short video to see Edpuzzle Teacher Assist in action.

gotFeedback is a tool that you can use to more efficiently give your students feedback on their writing. As the title of this post stated, gotFeedback uses artificial intelligence to help you provide your students with feedback on their writing. Watch this video to see how you can use gotFeedback to analyze your students’ writing.

QuestionWell is an AI tool that will generate reading comprehension and guiding questions for just about any article that you specify. Questions created by QuestionWell can be saved in a document or exported to a handful of popular quiz apps including Kahoot and Quizziz. QuestionWell takes the article that you’ve entered and generates a set of questions based on it. You can view all of the questions and select the ones that you like. The questions can be exported to a Word document and or exported to a quiz app. All of the question sets that you create are also saved in your QuestionWell account so that you can revisit them and edit them whenever you need to. Watch this video for a short overview of how QuestionWell works. 

Detecting AI-generated Content

GPTZero is a free tool that analyzes text to determine whether or not it was written by an artificial intelligence program. There are some features of GPTZero that make it a bit different from some of the other AI detection tools that I’ve tried. First, in addition to accepting text that you copy and paste into it, GPTZero lets you upload PDFs, Word docs, and TXT files to analyze them. Second, GPTZero will highlight for you the parts of an article that it determines to have a high likelihood of being written by an AI tool. Third, GPTZero provides a perplexity score and a burstiness score to illustrate how it was determined that a document was or was not written by an AI tool. 

AI Text Classifier is a free tool from Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, that will detect whether or not a passage of text has been written with ChatGPT and similar AI writing tools. To use AI Text Classifier you do need to have registered for a free account on Open AI. Once you have an account you can use the AI Text Classifier. To use AI Text Classifier you simply have to paste a block of writing (at least 1,000 characters, roughly 175 words) into the text field and click the submit button. AI Text Classifier will then rank the writing as very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely written by AI. For the record, AI Text Classifier classified my article about detecting writing created by AI as very unlikely to have been written by AI. 

AI Writing Check is a free tool created by the collaborative efforts of the non-profits Quill.org and CommonLit. AI Writing Check is a tool that was created to help teachers try to recognize writing created through the use of artificial intelligence. To use AI Writing Check you simply have to copy a passage of text of 100 or more words and paste it into AI Writing Check. The tool will then tell you the likelihood that the writing has or has not been created by artificial intelligence. That’s all there is to it. AI Writing Check isn’t foolproof and as is pointed out on the site, students can still develop ways to get around tools designed to detect AI-generated writing. It’s also worth noting that it can’t handle more than 400 words at a time. 

Crossplag AI Content Detector is a free tool that you can use to try to determine whether or not an AI tool was used to generate a passage of text. Like other AI detection tools, Crossplag AI Content Detector is easy to use. To use it you simply paste a block of text into the content detector and it will give a rating of likelihood that AI was used to create that text. 

Citing Content Created by AI

The MLA and the APA have published guidance on how to cite content created through the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. You can read the MLA guide to citing content created by AI here. The APA’s guide to citing content created by ChatGPT can be read here. 

There are many similarities between the two guides. There is one difference that’s worth noting. The APA’s guide includes a template for citing ChatGPT as an author. The MLA guide says not to treat generative AI tools like ChatGPT as an author.