Al-powered tools for English teachers

Only the lazy seem to have avoided making use of AI-powered tools which became a big trend of the last year. By now countless articles and masterclasses on how to use ChatGPT for ESL teaching have been created. 

However, are there any other AI-powered teaching tools we may use to create even more engaging and effective lessons? This is exactly what we are going to discuss today!

Let’s start with the basics. We often hear many misconceptions about AI, this mysterious non-human force that may potentially conquer the world, steal people’s jobs, and much more. 

What is really true though is that a lot of professionals in different fields are more scared of fairy tales about evil artificial intelligence than deeply invested in getting to know what AI really is and how it may be used for the benefit of their work. So, why don’t we start with the definition?

I was curious to know how artificial intelligence would define and describe an AI-powered tool, so I asked ChatGPT for the definition. Here is what I’ve got.

The key characteristics of AI described in the numerous articles on the topic are:

Machine learning (ML)

AI focuses on creating mathematical formulas and statistical models so that computers may learn from data and make predictions or judgments based on it. 

Deep learning

It is a specific type of machine learning that processes and learns from enormous volumes of data using artificial neural networks with numerous layers.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP gives computers the ability to comprehend, interpret, and produce human language.

Computer Vision

It focuses on training machines to sense, analyze, and interpret visual input from the environment in a way humans do.

Robotics

AI also gives physical systems and devices the ability to function independently or partially autonomously in the actual environment.

Expert Systems

Artificial intelligence systems are created to replicate the decision-making of human specialists in particular fields.

AI-powered tools are praised so much for a reason: according to Tech Target, their users benefit from AI in the following ways:

However, AI tools are not perfect and even though they are capable of performing tasks at a certain level, you are still likely to face several cons like:

In spite of facing some challenges due to the growth of AI’s popularity, educators have really benefited from AI-powered tools. 

These technologies may be used to:

Teachers may also save time, boost student engagement, and improve learning results with the use of AI tools. 

By implementing AI technologies into the work, teachers may increase the effectiveness of their instruction, give their students greater assistance, and keep up with the most recent developments in educational technology.

In this article we focus on the tools which help ESL teachers to successfully resolve such important issues as:

An important disclaimer: AI-powered tools may only ease your work, not complete it instead of you. You still have to carefully reread the information and edit it because the result is often amazing but still not perfect. That is why the most important thing in using AI-powered tools is staying a self-aware, accurate, and responsible professional. 

And now let’s get to the good part!

ChatGPT

ChatGPT doesn’t surprise ESL teachers anymore. Professionals have proved it to be extremely useful in completing a number of tasks. 

However, ChatGPT’s basic and most famous ability is answering questions, so whenever you are struggling with a definition or an answer, you may try asking AI for help. 

Perplexity

Perplexity is basically another tool for Q&As. 

However, its major advantage is that it also provides you with the links for some further reading/ watching resources where you may continue your research. It is an extremely useful tool for anybody who has no idea where to start from in their research. 

Here is the example of what you get after the tool processes your request:

In addition, Perplexity offers you a list of related topics which may be helpful in your research:

Nuance’s Dragon Speech Recognition

The groundbreaking AI-powered program called Dragon Speech Recognition, developed by Nuance Communications, enables teachers to quickly and accurately dictate their ideas. 

Dragon is the ideal tool for generating assignments, notes, and other papers since it can accurately translate your spoken words into written text using its powerful natural language processing skills. 

The software is always learning, adjusting to your speech patterns, and becoming better over time, which is the best part. It can even create custom words and commands to reflect your personal preferences.

iScanner

If you are tired of endless paperwork or even photos of your students’ essays, iScanner is a real savior. 

With the help of this tool, teachers may use AI to automate and optimize their regular work. The program makes it simple for teachers to exchange documents with their students and save them electronically by allowing users to take images of papers, assignments, and other documents and convert them into digital format. 

The program extracts text from scanned documents using optical character recognition, making it searchable and simple to find certain information. But that’s not all! 

iScanner also offers the opportunity to share scanned documents to cloud services, emails, and other apps. You can personalize feedback and improve communication with students. 

The app provides an annotation tool that you can use to add comments, highlights, and other notes to the scanned materials.

StoryWizard AI

This app has taken my breath away and I can’t wait to try using it with the young learners. 

The idea is the following: you don’t have to spend your time searching for or even creating some simple reading tasks which would be equally engaging and bright. Now you may use StoryWizard AI. 

All you need to do is answer a couple of questions about the character of your future story and write a two-sentence outline of the plot. 

As a result, you get a great short story with a lot of AI-generated pictures and questions at the end. 

For example, I tried to create a fairy tale about a cactus named Anton who wanted to find his true love 🙂 Here is one of the pages I got:

As you can see, the tool allows you to see the meaning and listen to the pronunciation of all the unknown words and edit both text and pictures if you don’t like something about the generated story.

Yippity

Any text or web page may be automatically turned into a quiz using Yippity. 

Based on the content that you type, the tool generates questions and answers that can be copied and pasted into a quiz or flashcard app. No more painful quiz creation!

Otter

Otter is an AI meeting assistant that takes notes, records audio, and slides, and automatically collects content. 

It will become a real relief if you often need to record meetings or class discussions.

Speechify

And here is your chance to finally stop the endless search for appropriate listening materials. You may create them on your own! 

Using AI techniques, the Speechify program converts text into audio files. With the help of this program, you may transform a wide range of text formats including papers, articles, PDF files, emails, web pages, and much more into human voice. 

You may listen to your audio at any speed, from a smartphone or desktop, featuring different voices (Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow are among them!).

Gradescope

Gradescope is considered to be the best evaluation tool available for teachers. 

With its cutting-edge AI technology, you can quickly evaluate and assess student progress by uploading scans or photographs of the students' work and using a friendly interface to mark and annotate the work. 

Multiple-choice replies may also be automatically graded by the AI-powered system, saving your precious  time and effort. 

The analytics and reporting system enable simple cooperation. Moreover, you may even share the feedback and the performance data with other teachers.

EssayGrader.ai

Teachers may quickly and correctly assess essays with the help of EssayGrader.ai. 

It offers comprehensive feedback reports based on rubrics for every level of grading, error reports that point out grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, and a summarizer tool that gives a clear overview of the most crucial details and distinctive phrases. 

In addition, teachers may get to know whether a part of a whole essay was produced by AI. 

Copyleaks

Becoming more and more worried about the abilities of AI? Wondering whether your students use it to complete the assignments? Copyleaks will help! 

This effective tool for detecting plagiarism scans a variety of documents, including PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, and even text from websites, using artificial intelligence to find cases of plagiarism that a human review may miss. 

Copyleaks’ cutting-edge AI technology allows it to identify even the most minor cases of plagiarism, giving teachers total faith in the originality of their students’ work.

Twee

The program can quickly generate questions for any YouTube video, discussions, letters, and articles on any topic and for any audience in a few seconds. 

It may also  generate True/False questions, open-ended questionnaires, and multiple-choice tests which is an absolute savior during everyday lessons preparation’ sessions. 

What is more, Twee can  find engaging conversation topics, facts, and quotations of well-known people to feature your lesson as well as develop fill-in-the-gap and open-the-brackets activities after looking for your topic-related vocabulary. 

Education Copilot

This application can generate high-quality well-structured lesson plans for any topic or concept. 

It can also assist in creating templates for lesson plans, writing prompts, project outlines and more. 

Additionally, it provides tools like a quiz builder, a rubric designer, a worksheet creator, and more. 

So, this tool with its AI-created templates for numerous educational purposes can for sure save time and effort of any teacher.

Roshi AI

This source can turn any video or article into a lesson plan, automatically simplify the text to make it appropriate for certain levels, create questions on what you are teaching and much more. 

Needless to say that this tool can make the preparation process much easier.

As you can see, AI may become a huge breakthrough in the quality, visualization and diversity of your lessons. So, maybe it’s time to check out what you can create with the help of AI-powered tools! Stay tuned and discover even more interesting resources with us!