What AI tools are you finding useful and reliable in teaching?

[xsquared]

Over the last academic year, there has been a push to increase the use of AI within teaching in our workplace, and it is something that really concerns me because of the impact it will have to the purpose of our role.

HR has sent out a survey on how we are using AI where we are and to be honest, as a maths teacher, I am still pretty much old school with my Powerpoints, but I do use a wide variety of maths websites like Maths Genie, Maths Whiteboard, Desmos for graphing etc as ICT within the classroom.

I have used ChatGPT and Co Pilot on occasions when I am creating trackers and marksheets, but of course they are old news now! My colleague rates Canva, so I will look into that, and a friend said they use Claude at work, so again I will have a play with that too, but I only have so much time to test everything!

What have you used that is efficient and reliable in the classroom or for assessment? There is so much out there and I don't know where to start in terms of experimenting because as soon as you start with one thing, new developments emerge already.

Thanks.

I’m also a maths teacher, and also being pushed to try AI. I really wanted it to be helpful with A level questions especially, but it isn’t there yet in terms of writing decent questions. It can imitate the language etc but once you scratch the surface it’s not good. It also can’t manage diagrams - understand them or create them, so very limited use for graphical or geometric stuff. I’ve also tried to get it to do mark schemes and/or model answers for existing questions. It’s fairly sensible for how to allocate the marks but the actual maths is sometimes incorrect. Plus depending on the software it can’t manage mathematical notation either. So I’m still waiting for it to help with that!!

On the other hand it’s been pretty useful at cracking out practice questions for the personal finance section in Core Maths, for students to practise the basic skills.

For me, I’m going to stick to my trusty textbooks, and online platforms like Sparx/DFM for now, for use in class

however it is great at admin- copilot writes a cracking email, and I found it very helpful to improve my ucas references! Plus i can never remember how to do a lookup in Excel and now i get Copilot to do for me so that is a win

It's generally shit for maths. It can't reliably generate anything with diagrams in because it doesn't know what shapes actually look like. It regularly gets questions wrong, but randomly and sometimes bizarrely so always need to check (it got solving a basic linear equation really wrong once).
I've tried to use it for generating questions but I'll say something like 'generate a set of 5 equations to solve with unknowns on both sides where the answers are negative whole numbers' and it will generate 5 equations then go 'oops, no, they don't have negative answers, let's try again' - or even worse, I'll have to point out that the answers aren't what I've asked for. I'm better off getting my questions from somewhere reliable.

I have used the app Gauth where you take a photo of a question and it solves it which can be handy for ideas if I'm stuck on a tricky further maths question or something, but it generally messes it up and gets it wrong about 25% of the time. Once it differentiated coshx to -sinhx.

I agree, it's crap at generating reliable maths questions!
Even when you ask it to, the formatting is messed up because it can't handle mathematical symbols and formulae. It would be faster for me to stick to LaTeX.

It is brilliant at admin essentially. Removes the need for proof reading. You can feed it loads of data and it will synthesize it and give you the report. It is essentially, as computers are, an amazing research and grouping tool. But way faster. It will be no use for maths or problems because it doesn't think. Its brilliant at pulling loads of websites together to get a plan together but that's it. But also like google, you have to ask it the right questions. It is immeasurably helping my admin. It can't actually do the creativity to teach, it can just help find stuff.

Removes the need for proof reading. You can feed it loads of data and it will synthesize it and give you the report.

Oh no, you definitely should still be proof reading. You can feed it loads of data and it will give you a report containing stuff that it has made up that isn’t in the data.