Since my last post sharing AI tools that teachers of students under 13 years of age can use with their students, I’ve found some more tools that we can use with our students! Once you’ve established a class AI policy then kids are ready to go and begin practicing. After finding out about CodeBreaker’s Byte AI I heard about the DigCitInstitute’s Mundo AI. Much like Byte, students can use the Mundo Chatbot to ask questions without having to sign into anything and without having to create an account. So I put Mundo through the same test I’ve put Bing Chat, Curipod (here’s a post with great info on Curipod), and Byte using a student-written 9-11 article draft.
I began by copying and pasting a short article rough draft written by one of my 5th graders into the Mundo AI. Just like with Byte, I could not paste the entire article into the prompt box because it does not allow for very many characters. This is very annoying. At first, Mundo understood that I was going to paste the article in more than one prompt but I didn’t calculate how many times I would need to paste the entire article so it started giving me feedback before I had pasted the whole article. Once we got through that, the feedback was in par with Bing Chat, Byte, and Curipod. They all provide helpful feedback for students. What I do miss about Bing Chat is that, besides being able to paste your entire article, you also get links to its resources.
Here is the Mundo conversation in its entirety:
I think students can use that feedback and ask further questions to help them with their writing. This can level the playing field for all our students so I am fully in favor of having my students use this in my writing class that is not an ELA class. My teaching partner is the ELA teacher for all our shared 5th and 6th grade students and she is not using AI with the specific writing goals she has for them.
I’ve also been learning more about and using MagicSchool AI, a tool that I share with teachers along with Curipod because I find both tools to be excellent. I recently completed their MagicSchool AI Educator Certification Level 1 Course and I signed up to be a MagicSchool AI Pioneer. Both Curipod and MagicSchool AI are amazing tools and both server different purposes, Curipod is a tool for teachers to create all sorts of incredible interactive presentations for students and MagicSchool AI privides a suite of tools for teachers to help us with so many of the tasks required of us to do our job. That is why I am also a Curipod Certified Educator and Ambassador. Both tools can be used by teachers without duplicating what each tool does so they are both great additions to a teacher’s tool belt.
Of the many tools for teachers that MagicSchool provides, one caught my eye for the work I’ve been doing with our 9/11 Class Book, the Student Feedback Tool. I used this one more like how I used Curipod – indirectly. Curipod and the MagicSchool tools are not for direct student use, and MagicSchool is for teacher use only, but the Student Feedback Tool is for teachers to paste student work and get quick feedback they can share with students. I would use the feedback tool to copy and paste writing that my students share with me via Google Docs or Google Classroom, then I can copy and paste the AI feedback on the document for students to read and use to polish and improve their rough drafts. With Google’s history I can see the process my students take to write their final drafts.
Here is how I used the MagicSchool AI Student Feedback Tool with the same 9/11 article shown above:
Like Bing Chat and Curipod one thing I instantly appreciate is the ability to copy and paste the entire article all at once. I did use the follow up prompts the Student Feedback Tool suggested and I thought that was helpful. The next step is for me to copy and paste as much or as little of the feedback for each student. While this is a powerful tool and a great opportunity for teachers to get some help reading through students work, it’s not as powerful as having the students use a tool themselves and practice using and prompting AI for themselves. I did try sharing the entire output shown above by making it public and copying the link but when I pasted the link into a different account I had to sign into MagicSchool AI and fully create an account, which students, non-educators really, cannot do. Both Curipod and MagicSchool AI have free versions with upgrade to paid versions that offer more.
Try Mizou to Create Your Own Chatbots!
When ChatGPT added the ability to create your own Chatbots I was excited but did not create one because my students are still too young to use the Chatbot I create since it’s still ChatGPT. Right? I don’t know for sure but that seems a reasonable assumption based on their terms of use. Then I came upon Mizou – a service where you can create your own Chatbots, for specific uses, for your students and like Byte and Mundo, students do not need to sign into anything nor create accounts (here’s a cool post with more details about Mizou)!
I started the process to create my own Chatbot and used the generative support feature where I started the topic idea and got help from a generative AI in writing up the details of the prompt. Basically, I created an AI Chatbot to help students write articles about 9/11! Click here to access the Chatbot I created via a session that I have active right now.
Here is my 9/11 Fact Verification Bot when I used it for ideas with the same student article I’ve used above:
I created that Chatbot quite quickly and it proved to be about as helpful as all the others I’ve used! And it allows students to paste their entire article, at least one the size of the one I’ve been using, and I can access the student’s entire history from the teacher dashboard!
That is pretty darn cool! So far, Mizou is jumping to the top of my list for Chatbots for students to use directly over Byte and Mundo because I can quickly create one for any purpose and share with students via a link.
Here’s what I got when I tried Mundo and Mizou for Math support.
What do you all think?
