Artificial intelligence, or AI, appears to be seeing more and more acceptance in an education setting — and the makers of a new AI-powered tool named PowerBuddy hope they've created a way to save teachers time and improve learning for students.
Shivani Stumpf is the chief product and innovation officer for PowerSchool and says their tool can potentially help save teachers the work involved with creating new lesson plans. Stumpf says the tool could also help with other aspects of the education process that consume time that could be used for other important tasks.
Stumpf says school districts collect thousands upon thousands of data points about students, and she says the tool her company is creating is trying to "leverage those data points" to "create a learning path."
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"PowerBuddy has already helped educators in 3,000 school districts save an approximation of 600 instruction hours," she said.
The tool's makers hope it can help with lesson plans, assignments and assessments.
But, while AI's promises are large and hopeful, education leaders say there are still potentially serious downsides. Some believe the technology has the potential to produce biased or inaccurate responses because data could be faulty, according to a report from Education Week.
Still, PowerSchool says it embraces a mantra it calls responsible AI. While dealing with highly sensitive student data, the company says it will prioritize having what it calls "guardrails" that are put in place around the challenges of data governance and data security.
