This article aims to present some AI-powered tools that can be used by educators to help them save time for their lesson preparation and others exploited by learners to assist them in their homework and improve their performance.
To start with educators, Diffit (https://web.diffit.me/) can help them produce educational resources in accordance with their students’ level. More specifically, it can produce text about a topic through a sentence/question, an article URL, a YouTube video, or even a list of words. Thus, teachers are able to create a reading text with a view to having their students practise already taught vocabulary; introducing new vocabulary; and practising or assessing reading comprehension. In addition, they can generate worksheets or even Google Forms quizzes relevant to the produced text. Diffit contributes to the differentiation of teaching since it can adjust the generated resources to the students' age, level, and learning abilities. In no way can these resources replace the creativity and inspiration of the resources produced by teachers. However, with the necessary modifications, they can save teachers both time and effort.
ChatGPT (https://chatgpt.com/) is another AI tool that helps teachers create texts and exercises/quizzes. Furthermore, it can produce stories and poems. By setting the type of questions/exercises (open-ended, multiple choice, fill in the blanks, checkbox, True/False, etc.), the students’ age and their proficiency level, exercises along with their answers are to be produced about a given topic or from a specific text. Although the result may not always be satisfactory, it certainly provides teachers with a good basis to build upon, making the necessary modifications and/or corrections. Another beneficial use of ChatGPT could be the correction of students' exercises. Teachers can copy and paste a student’s exercise, and it will take over to find the errors. It can even provide suggestions for improving the specific student’s performance upon request. Another essential use of this AI tool is the creation of lesson plans. On condition that the teacher provides analytical information about the objectives, the techniques and the learners’ profiles, the generated lesson plan could be a very targeted one, and it could even include differentiated activities. There is a possibility, though, for the produced lesson plan to require adaptations to meet the teacher’s original expectations. Nevertheless, it can definitely offer teachers a good basis to start with and draw ideas from.
Gamma (https://gamma.app/) is an AI tool that can create online presentations through text, files (PDF, DOCX, etc.) or even a prompt. It takes care of the formatting and design of the slides. It allows the customisation and improvement of the presentations produced and enables the embedding of media such as GIF files, videos, graphs, and websites. If desired, it enriches the presentation with images automatically searched for on the Internet or created with AI. It should be taken into account, though, that as far as the free version is concerned, there is a limitation which allows the creation of only up to ten slides.
Luvvoice (https://luvvoice.com/) is a free online text-to-speech tool that turns text into natural-sounding speech. It offers a wide range of AI voices. Teachers simply paste their text or add their file (PDF, DOC), choose a voice, and download the resulting MP3 file. It can help educators turn texts into speech in an attempt to create their own listening tasks with the intention of introducing, practising, or reviewing the desired vocabulary or grammar structures.
Moving on to students, QuillBot (https://quillbot.com/grammar-check) is a tool that can help them check whether they have structured grammatically correct texts. It can also provide them with feedback about their errors. It is worth mentioning that the feedback is in English. Therefore, if the students’ proficiency level is low, they may not fully benefit from the tool's potential.
Speechnotes (https://speechnotes.com/) is a speech-to-text AI tool that can take notes of anyone's voice for free. This way, learners could potentially improve their pronunciation. Using this tool to utter sentences that provide the answer to a question or even a whole essay assigned as homework, they are given the opportunity to detect their pronunciation errors, as the tool, in case of a pronunciation error, will transcribe something different from what they have in mind. Besides, students diagnosed with dyslexia or dysgraphia will be able to produce writing tasks just by having the tool turn their speech into text. This way, their stress deriving from the writing process will be decreased, and their self-confidence will be boosted.
DeepL (https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) is a translation tool which could replace traditional dictionaries, since it is less time-consuming. It can supply learners with the most appropriate equivalent word in the foreign language when they write a task, as long as they also provide the context they are to place this word in. Additionally, students could use it to find out the meaning of a word, a phrase, or even a whole sentence when dealing with the rubrics of a task; an unknown word while reading an English literature book or even when they are just curious to become aware of how a particular meaning is expressed in the target language. It is essential that teachers train their students to make use of this tool in the most effective way. They must ensure that their learners understand the significance of providing it with the context of the word or phrase they are in search of in order to get the most accurate translation. What is more, it is vital that students realise, through their teachers’ guidance, that copying and pasting the tool's outcome into their document in a mechanical way does not help them assimilate the new knowledge and benefit from its use. Finally, Luvvoice (https://luvvoice.com/) could be used not only by educators but by learners, as well. Whenever they feel insecure about the pronunciation of a word, the tool is always at hand to help them out and prove them right or wrong, serving as a way to assess their knowledge and turn them into more independent learners.
