Today in class we watched some of the Ed-tech presentations that we have been working on in our groups. One of the presentations today from Thomas, Lukas and Brad spoke about using AI for assessing student’s work. Some of the benefits they mentioned are; this could help reduce teacher bias, save time and maintain consistency when doing assessment. I also think it can also be useful for generating assessment tools such as rubrics, or assignment guidelines for students. For example, my group used AI to create this rubric, which we used to assess students for their health assignment. I also found this “rubric generator” AI tool that is free for teachers. Thomas, Lukas and Mark also mentioned that students and parents would need to provide informed consent if teachers are planning to use AI for assessment purposes. I’m curious if the majority of students/parents would be in favor of this. 

I don’t know for sure, but I have suspected the AI may have been used to provide feedback on my assignments as a student. This made me feel discouraged, as it felt ingenuine and like the time and effort I had put into completing the assignment was not valued by the teacher. As a teacher I wouldn’t want students to feel this way, so personally I don’t plan on using AI for assessment, especially for providing descriptive feedback and/or report card comments. I do think it could be a valuable time saver for marking multiple choice quizzes or tests but those are less common in my teachable subject area (PHE).

Another benefit of assessing students manually is that it can be a diagnostic tool for teachers to gauge if students have met the learning goals. It would be difficult to do this when using AI, as teachers would not be looking at the student’s work thoroughly, and this could affect their ability to plan next steps for the class to address any gaps in their learning. As Rich mentioned in class, it is important to find out if your school has a policy on using AI for marking. UVic for example, does not allow professors to use AI to grade students work.

I didn’t have an opportunity to ask this group my questions but these are the ones I had prepared in advance:

1. Are there concerns about sharing work with third-party platforms?
2. If there was training provided for teachers on using AI for marking, what do you think this training should include?