January is the time of year when we reevaluate, reset, and discover new trends. 2022 is looking like a BIG year for EdTech! Top trends for EdTech in 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), are showing up in everything from classroom management tools to cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence in education is revolutionizing how teachers and students engage with learning. In 2022, AI-driven innovations are not only streamlining administrative tasks but also personalizing learning experiences, integrating seamlessly with project-based learning approaches and enriching STEM resources. Since our job here at EDGEucating is to bring you cutting-edge education resources, I am going to discuss some Artificial Intelligence Trends in Education that will help improve your classroom and job!
AI isn’t new—the term was coined in 1956. For decades, science fiction has been predicting unimaginable changes, both amazing and catastrophic, said to arise with the materialization and widespread of artificial intelligence. While AI hasn’t made quite the impact that sci-fi has predicted, it has quietly become pervasive in numerous aspects of our daily lives.
AI and ML are key drivers of growth and innovation across all industries, and the education sector is no different. According to eLearning Industry, upwards of 47% of learning management tools will be enabled with AI capabilities in the next three years.
Artificial Intelligence is now a part of our normal lives. We are surrounded by this technology, from automatic parking systems, smart sensors for taking spectacular photos, and personal assistance. Similarly, AI in education is being felt, and the traditional methods are changing drastically.
Artificial Intelligence in Education: Making Academics More Convenient and Personalized
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the educational landscape, offering innovative solutions to enhance teaching and learning experiences. From streamlining administrative tasks to introducing assistive technology for diverse learners and integrating coding robots into STEM curricula, AI is reshaping how education is delivered and experienced. This has changed the way people learn since educational materials are becoming accessible to all through smart devices and computers.
The education industry has been TALKING ABOUT technology integration and advancements for more than a decade. However, talk is about all that has really been happening in this arena for a while. There’s no question the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to everyday life. But it has also spurred rapid growth in technologies that aim to make everyday life simpler, much of which uses AI and/or ML. In 2020 and 2021, educators pioneered EdTech tools for their classrooms at an overwhelming pace. One of the EdTech trends that gained a lot of ground during this pioneering time was AI.
AI-powered technology solutions have been in the EdTech space for some time, however, the industry has been slow to adopt them, just as it has with other EdTech. The pandemic drastically shifted the landscape, forcing educators to rely on technology for virtual learning. Now, 86% of educators say technology should be a core part of education. The use of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly in school districts, showing up in programs and software models that support everything from storytime to security.
So, what are these AI-powered technology solutions that are currently trending in education? Well, let’s take a look!
How Can AI Be Used in K–12 Education?
1. AI-Powered Teacher Assistance
You are well aware that teachers don’t just teach. Educators often juggle numerous tasks, from lesson planning to grading. AI tools are stepping in to alleviate these burdens by automating administrative duties, allowing teachers to focus more on student engagement and instruction. Additionally, AI-driven assistive technology is enabling educators to better support students with diverse learning needs, ensuring a more inclusive classroom environment.
AI can assist with scheduling, streamline communications, and even help develop customized learning materials. One major time-saver is grading. Many teachers now use platforms that automate assessments for multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank tests—so many, in fact, that listing them would require a separate article.
Grading written assignments has traditionally been a challenge to automate, but that’s changing. Tools like Grammarly help with grammar evaluation, while AI-driven essay graders are emerging to assess content using both machine learning and human-informed algorithms. These tools are still evolving, but they’re already making a difference.
“Alexa, read us a story.”
Teachers are also adopting smart assistants like Amazon Echo and Alexa—tools parents popularized during remote learning—to support classroom routines. Inspired by this trend, some districts have implemented Symphony Classroom, a platform that powers Merlyn, the first digital assistant designed for education. Merlyn integrates with the tools teachers already use, offering shortcuts and voice-activated support to make daily tasks faster and easier.
These innovations aren’t just about saving time—they help educators reclaim energy and focus for what matters most: their students.
2. Intelligent Assessment Systems
Traditional testing methods are evolving with the integration of AI. Adaptive assessment platforms utilize AI algorithms to evaluate student performance in real-time, providing immediate feedback and adjusting question difficulty based on individual responses. These platforms often incorporate assistive technology features, such as text-to-speech and alternative input methods, to accommodate students with varying abilities. This approach not only personalizes the testing experience but also offers insights into student learning patterns, enabling targeted interventions. Artificial intelligence can vastly improve the types of assessments teachers use to guide student learning. The use of AI student assessments is rapidly expanding in education. Many software platforms are beginning to integrate built-in stealth assessments that students do not even recognize as a test. This is beneficial for students with test anxiety, removing it as a factor and increasing student engagement. Many of these tests are designed to appear more like games, which increases student engagement and decreases resistance to learning and testing.
Testing doesn’t just mean an end-of-unit assessment. There are several companies such as Content Technologies and Carnegie Learning, currently developing intelligent instruction design and digital platforms that use AI to provide learning, testing, and feedback to students from pre-K to college level that gives them the challenges they are ready for, identifying gaps in knowledge and redirecting to new topics when appropriate. Ongoing assessments are often much more powerful and meaningful than comprehensive end-of-topic assessments.
AI has been used by state departments for years to grade state tests and by large testing organizations for scoring tests like the ACT and SAT. With the vast new developments in AI related to education, we can expect changes in our mandated assessment systems to follow suit.
Well-designed formative assessments that take advantage of the latest advancements in technology can help students learn faster and better. From intelligent tutoring, stealth assessments, games, and virtual reality, mini-tests built by AI can provide a wide variety of ways to use this technology to build student engagement tools.
3. Personalized Learning Experiences
By leveraging artificial intelligence in education, personalized learning pathways can be developed, aligning with project-based learning methodologies to enhance student engagement. One of the most significant impacts of AI in education is the ability to tailor learning experiences to individual student needs. Through assistive technology, AI can adapt content delivery to suit various learning styles and abilities, ensuring that each student receives personalized support. This personalization ensures that students receive the support they need to succeed, fostering a more inclusive learning environment.
From kindergarten to graduate school, one of the key ways AI will impact education is through the application of greater levels of personalized learning. This is already happening through growing numbers of adaptive learning programs, games, and software.
AI-powered assistive technology is becoming an essential tool in classrooms, helping to meet the diverse needs of learners by supporting personalized instruction and reducing barriers to participation. Adjusting learning based on an individual student’s particular needs has been a priority for educators for years, but AI will allow a level of differentiation that’s currently impossible for teachers managing 30 students per class. This arena of AI is probably the one that most educators are most familiar with.
If you are seeking more information on coding robots that offer assistive technology features, you will want to check out our blog article “Ensuring Diversity & Equity with Assistive Technology.”
As educators, we have seen this trend developing for several years now. The COVID pandemic forced remote learning, which was one of the fastest-growing areas last year. Unable to be there in person to observe students, teachers were relying more and more on technology and AI to do this job for them. I want to be clear here, machines will never be able to do this job as well as a human, but they can make our job easier.
Ask any parent who has struggled during the pandemic to help their child with algebra, and they will be thrilled about the potential of AI to support their children when they are struggling at home with homework or test preparations. Tutoring and studying programs are becoming more advanced thanks to AI.
We have spent the last few months focusing on tutoring here at EDGEucating. You may want to check out the following articles if you are interested in specific tutoring resources.
Through artificial intelligence in education, teachers can access tailored professional development resources, including training on integrating STEM resources and implementing project-based learning strategies effectively. AI-powered coaching tools provide teachers with feedback on their instructional methods, highlighting areas for improvement and suggesting resources for development. This continuous feedback loop promotes reflective teaching practices and contributes to overall educational quality. AI is currently making its way to helping teachers improve and customize lessons and teaching strategies. It can provide feedback about the success of the lesson as a whole, monitor student progress, and alert when there might be an issue with student performance, as well as identify areas where teachers can improve instruction.
Teachers are sometimes not aware of gaps in their lessons and educational materials that can leave students confused about certain concepts. AI can help solve this problem. Coursera, a massive open online course provider, is already implementing this. When a large number of students are found to submit the wrong answer to a homework assignment, the system alerts the teacher and gives future students a customized message that offers hints to the correct answer.
AI-based learning systems will be able to give educators useful information about their students’ learning styles, abilities, and progress, and provide suggestions for how to customize their teaching methods to students’ individual needs. Recently, the University of Murcia in Spain began testing an AI-enabled chatbot to answer students’ questions about the campus and areas of study. As this chatbot was rolled out, the school’s administrators were surprised to discover that it was able to answer more than 38,708 questions, answering correctly more than 91% of the time. Google recently released a new AI-powered learning platform, and students can learn in highly individualized ways, and educational institutions can scale their efforts to meet student needs. The platform is a suite of applications and APIs that can be integrated into an institution’s existing infrastructure. This new platform includes a chatbot that was designed with education in mind.
Although this form of AI is another that is still in its infancy, it is rapidly becoming more mainstream.
5. Smarter Data For School Operations
One big advancement is in school security, there are now smart camera systems that use AI to monitor security threats. These enable instant, real-time responses to trespassing and brandished weapons. Systems such as these increase school administrations’ ability to react to threats without adding a visible layer of security, which could make stakeholders uncomfortable.
Schools regularly use AI to detect students at risk of self-harm, violence against others, and bullying. This is done inside their network systems and monitors things such as students’ emails and other postings to identify potential concerns. The software typically scans for certain keywords and phrases on school-issued devices and alerts an administrator when it finds a targeted key phrase, The Wall Street Journal reported. Of course, this still needs a human to review and verify the data before acting like a machine can only interpret so much of this type of data.
In addition, many IT departments use self-learning algorithms for identifying spam and network intrusions. This is one of the older forms of AI use that has been around for a while now. However, I felt it was worth mentioning since it is changing in this new age of Blockchain technology. I have an entire article on this that you can read here.
6. Advancements in Project-Based Learning and STEM Education
Tools like coding robots are being utilized in classrooms to provide hands-on experiences, allowing students to apply coding skills in real-world scenarios and fostering deeper engagement in STEM subjects.
Artificial intelligence in education is transforming project-based learning by providing dynamic STEM resources, enabling students to tackle real-world problems with innovative solutions. Administrators are using humanoid robots to guide campus tours and teach Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) concepts at all levels. By using the Pepper platform, instructors and researchers stay current with major technical and commercial breakthroughs in programming and applied research. This humanoid robot uses AI technology to make interaction with human beings as natural and intuitive as possible. It has no trouble perceiving the environment and entering into a conversation with a person. The touch screen on the chest displays content to highlight messages and support speech. This is yet another way that AI is helping schools run smoothly and save precious time.
To learn more about these EdTech trends and others, Google partnered with a team of researchers to produce the “Future of the Classroom” report that identifies research-based current and emerging trends to watch for and resources to help schools prepare students for what’s next.
Artificial Intelligence In Education Equals More Time For Teaching
Embracing artificial intelligence in education paves the way for enriched project-based learning experiences and the effective utilization of STEM resources, fostering an inclusive and innovative educational landscape. By leveraging AI technologies, educators can enhance their teaching strategies, students can benefit from customized learning experiences, and the education system as a whole can move towards a more innovative and inclusive future.
To sum it all up, teachers and administrators spend a lot of time on non-teaching tasks, and it overwhelms them. Artificial Intelligence will automate these tasks, affording teachers more time to do their primary work of teaching without being bothered with administrative tasks. With educators busier than ever, AI can offer them more of their most prized possession, time! The opportunities — and challenges — that AI brings to education are significant, and only time will tell the ultimate impact it will have on the industry.
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Please join this conversation by sharing how you or your school is implementing Artificial Intelligence in education practices. Drop it in the comments below so that everyone in our community can benefit from your creative, cutting-edge solutions!
