Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a popular topic currently, with the integration of AI into education offering a unique opportunity for teachers and students alike. AI has the potential to provide students with personalised and engaging learning experiences, as well as help them develop important 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving.
Learning can be specifically tailored for particular learners, it can streamline and make administrative tasks easier, and it opens up new possibilities for how we engage with education. As technology continues to advance, the role of AI in education is likely to grow, creating even more innovative and effective learning experiences.
AI can tailor assignments to the individual needs and abilities of each student. By analysing a student's performance and learning style, AI can provide personalised challenges and resources. It can also give immediate feedback on assignments, helping students to understand their mistakes and learn from them.
AI-powered tools can also assist students in researching topics for their assignments. Let’s look at a couple of these AI tools that can help you produce work of a high standard.
1. Quillbot: your personal writing assistant
QuillBot is a writing assistant tool designed to help you paraphrase, rephrase, summarise and enhance your writing. Initially starting out as a paraphrasing tool, it’s developed into a useful writing tool that corrects your grammar, summarises your writing, generates citations and checks for plagiarism, all with the help of AI.
Key features
- Paraphraser: one of QuillBot’s most popular features, rephrases sentences or paragraphs while still maintaining the original text’s meaning. It can also be used to identify and suggest replacements for key phrases, break up long sentences for search engine optimization (SEO), or change the tone of a sentence.
- Grammar checker: scans text inputs for subject-verb agreement, verb tense, pronoun usage, punctuation, spelling and sentence structure errors. ** **
- Summarizer: ** **is able to condense your longer text into a shorter, more concise version that still maintains the main ideas from your original text.
Advantages of using Quillbot
- Language enhancement: this helps improve the overall quality and fluency of your writing by suggesting alternative word and phrasing options.
- Helps avoid plagiarism: by helping you create original and unique content whilst still maintaining the essence of the original ideas imputed.
Using Quillbot practically for your assignments
QuillBot can be useful when writing assignments. Here are a few examples:
- Paraphrasing and rewriting
- Vocabulary extension, helpful to find alternative words or phrases
- Improve your sentence structure to enhance the meaning
- Creating variations of the same sentence or paragraph, in order to choose the best option
- Summarising a paragraph into a shorter, more succinct version
- Checking for plagiarism
2. Canva: personalised and intuitive design
Canva is an online graphic design platform that helps you create a variety of visual content, from social media graphics, posters to presentations and more. It’s very user-friendly and offers drag-and-drop functionality, making designing something eye-catching possible even for those who are relatively unskilled in design.
Canva has a vast library of templates, images, icons, and fonts, enabling you to customise and create professional-looking designs. It uses the power of AI to understand its users preferences, provide intelligent recommendations and automate design processes.
Key features
- Smart templates: Canva uses AI to offer smart templates that adapt to your preferences by learning from your interactions.
- Predictive design recommendations: AI algorithms in Canva analyse your behaviour and provide predictive design recommendations, from colour palettes, font combinations to layout options, based on your design history.
- Adaptive user interface: As you use the Canva platform, it learns your preferences and adjusts the platform interface to highlight the most popular tools and features.
Advantages of using Canva
- Intuitive interface: Canva's intuitive interface caters to both students and professionals. Its simple navigation smooths the design journey, with the drag-and-drop feature making placing design elements a breeze.
- Comprehensive free version: Its free version is comprehensive, enabling individuals to create captivating designs without spending a penny.
- Aids teamwork: Multiple users can synchronously edit and comment on designs, fostering real-time collaboration.
- Stock photo library: Canva’s inbuilt stock photo library makes choosing the perfect image for your design easy, saving you time.
3. Grammarly: a lifesaver for student writers
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant and grammar checker that helps you improve your written communication skills. It offers a range of features designed to enhance the quality of your written content, whether it's an email, an essay, a social media post, or any other type of document.
Key features
Advanced grammar and style checking
- Corrects grammar and spelling: Grammarly automatically detects and corrects your grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in real-time, providing instant feedback as you type. The punctuation and style tool makes suggestions on punctuation and style, helping refine your writing for clarity and understanding.
- Suggests synonyms: it also suggests synonyms and alternative word choices to improve the overall quality and diversity of the language used in your text.
Tone and clarity improvements
- Insights into the tone of writing: Grammarly provides insights into the tone of your writing, helping align your communication with your intended tone, i.e. casual, professional or friendly.
- Personalised writing goals: you can also set personalised writing goals, such as improving clarity, engagement, or conciseness, and Grammarly provides tailored suggestions to achieve those goals.
- Readability: it can be used to assess the readability of your text, especially key for academic essay writing, as it offers suggestions to improve the overall flow and comprehension of the writing.
Advantages of using Grammarly
Grammarly is widely used by students looking specifically to improve the accuracy, clarity, and overall quality of their written content.
Its user-friendly interface and real-time suggestions and plagiarism checker make it a popular tool particularly for students in the academic field wanting to improve their writing.
4. Otter.ai: your personal lecture transcriber
Otter.ai is an advanced transcription and note-taking application that uses AI to convert spoken words into written text. It offers a range of features that make it very useful for students keen on accurately and efficiently transcribing lecture notes.
Key features
Real-time transcription services
- Live transcription: Otter.ai uses advanced speech recognition technology to transcribe spoken words into written text in real-time. This live transcription can be used during lectures, meetings and interviews, enabling you to follow along with written notes as the conversation progresses.
Meeting and lecture notes organisation
- Beneficial for students: Otter.ai is a great tool when needing to transcribe and summarise lecture notes and meetings, making it easier for you to accurately and comprehensively take notes, review key points and action items.
Advantages of using Otter.ai
- Multi-modal note-taking made possible: Otter.ai supports a multi-modal approach to note-taking, combining text with synchronised audio recordings.
- AI-Powered voice recognition: it uses AI algorithms to recognize different voices, making it capable of attributing spoken words to specific speakers, great for lectures when different key speakers present.
- Collaboration and sharing: it’s easy to collaborate and share notes in real-time - very useful for group discussions.
- Keyword and highlight extraction: you can extract keywords and highlights from transcriptions, making it easier to identify key points within a conversation or lecture.
- Custom vocabularies: Otter.ai supports custom vocabularies, allowing you to add specific terms, names, or industry jargon to improve the accuracy of transcriptions in specialised fields - particularly useful for post-grad students.
- Cross-platform accessibility: it’s accessible across various platforms, including web browsers, mobile devices, and desktop applications.
5. Slidesgo: revolutionising student presentations with AI
Slidesgo offers you free customisable Google Slide and PowerPoint templates to make your presentations more creative. Slidesgo is part of a broader set of resources like Freepik (vectors, images), Flaticon (icons), and Videvo (videos and motion graphics). The latest addition to Slidesgo is an AI presentation maker, which goes beyond standardised templates and generates slides using generative AI.
Key features
- AI-driven presentation templates: Slidesgo offers a wide range of free, high-quality presentation templates, perfect for students to download and use in software like Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Apple Keynote. Templates are specifically designed for educational purposes, often including pre-designed infographics and diagrams, making it a valuable resource for students and educational institutions.
- Customisable slides for various subjects: Users can easily customise the templates to fit their specific needs, from editing text, adding images, adjusting colour to incorporating branding elements. Templates also cover diverse categories and topics, including business, education, marketing, technology and more.
Advantages of using Slidesgo
- Slick draft slide decks: Like other AI presentation generators, Slidesgo builds a draft slide deck in minutes, based on a written prompt that you provide, and works in sync with Wepik, a sister project of Slidego which lets you edit the slides easily after they have been generated by the AI.
- Slidesgo saves you time: it simplifies the presentation design process, allowing you to create professional and engaging presentations efficiently. By leveraging ready-made templates, you save time on design, enabling you to concentrate on delivering a compelling message in your content.
- Consistent, professional design: using Slidesgo ensures consistency in design across all slides, with the overall cohesive look contributing to a more professional presentation.
- Examples for inspiration: Slidesgo templates often include examples of how to structure content, use visual elements, and organise information effectively, serving as inspiration to help you along.
- Enhanced collaboration: In group work or collaborative projects, using Slidesgo allows team members to work with a consistent and professional design. It streamlines the collaborative process, ensuring everyone adheres to a unified visual theme, and frees up their time to spend on research and adding content to their section of the presentation.
Conclusion
In simple terms, AI is like a helpful assistant for both students and educators. It personalises learning, makes administrative tasks easier, and opens up new possibilities for how we engage with education.
As technology continues to advance, the role of AI in education is likely to grow, creating even more innovative and effective learning experiences for students and educators alike.