Beyond New Horizons

This blog post refers to a new AI app that I am developing with James Huggins to support teacher workload with writing marking and assessment. You can access further information, and sign up for the testing group, here.

When I qualified as a teacher in 2007, the use of technology in education looked very different from what it does today. In fact, the use of technology in the world looked very different. As a millennial, I had negotiated the coming of the internet age and the inclusion of ICT in the curriculum in schools. In 2007, the iPhone had not launched, and the use of “ICT across the curriculum” was about using technologies to create. At the same time, Learning Platforms and closed digital messaging systems were the order of the day – a huge contrast to the social technologies that are now prevalent today.

Over the years I have seen the use of technologies change the way we live and work in the world alongside changing the education system. The pandemic was a make or break time for many of these technologies and without them many would have lost access to education.

As a teacher, I have always tried to use technology in a relevant and meaningful way with my students, but also to make my worklife more efficient and my roles more manageable. The advent of cloud storage was a “game changer” for me, and meant that I had secure storage (and more of it) with constant backups. It also meant that I could drastically reduce my paper usage.

Spurred on by the efficiency that technologies afforded and with the advent of AI (Artificial Inteligence), I began to think of ways in which AI can support teacher workload beyond it simply generating and creating content. I thought of things that I found were very “workload heavy” as a primary classroom teacher. One that immediately jumped to mind was marking and assessing extended writing. It is a joy to read children’s writing but the assessment of it is always subjective and time consuming. I have sat in many writing moderation meetings over the years and we have gone through the National Curriculum to cross reference it with a sample of writing many times. It takes ages and this significantly adds to teachers’ mental and time load.

I wondered about whether AI could help to take some of this mental load away from teachers and to reduce the amount of time needed to assess and moderate writing. The idea was that it would never replace the teacher’s judgment but provide a moderated judgment. I quickly dismissed this as too difficult and not feasible.

A few weeks earlier, I had re-connected with James Huggins (“J”) who co-created the wonderful Land of Me software which I used at the start of my career. We talked about projects and he seemed to think that the AI Writing Moderation concept could potentially work… and it did.

We are are now at the point where we have a working prototype that we are currently testing. You can see an example output from the app above that has successfully analysed a piece of children’s writing… including their handwriting!

The process of using it is simple:

1. The teacher takes a photograph of the child’s writing (this works best when it is unmarked or a final piece).
2. The AI then reads the child’s writing and transcribes it into digital text. You can edit the transcription to remove information such as learning objectives and correct any errors with the transcription.
3. The teacher then clicks the assessment button and the AI assesses the child’s writing against the National Curriculum. It provides feedback, a level judgement and points for development.

The AI in the app is even able to quote the children’s writing to give examples of where it met objectives from the National Curriculum and what they need to do to move to the next level.

We’re really excited about the app and the feedback from our testers so far is that the app is highly accurrate and has the potential to really reduce teacher workload. We’re still looking for teachers to test the app so if you’re a primary teacher and are interested, please click here to sign up.