Making Learning Fun with MagicSchool

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the plethora of MagicSchool Teacher Tools. One common question is always...can students use MagicSchool? The answer is yes...but. In order for students to engage with MagicSchool's tools, a teacher needs to set up a "Room" and share it with their students. This extra step allows teachers to fully control how the students interact with AI and allows them to see a full transcript along with AI generated insights into the students' conversations.

To build a Student Room in MagicSchool, navigate to the left side of the screen and select "Student Tools".

From there, you will see all the tools that are available for students to use - many of which are the same as the Teacher Tools! Your Student Room can have just one tool or you can add a bunch for students to pick and choose from as they work. Let's start with just one. I'll use the "Character Chatbot". This tool allows students to "chat" with any historical figure, author, or fictional character. Here's what the prompt looks like:

The first two sections - Tool Name and Tool Description - are visible to the student, so you will want to change those to be more descriptive. If, for example, I want my students to talk to The Cat in the Hat, I could call my tool "Cat in the Hat Chat" and give a description like "Come chat with the Cat in his tall striped hat, where questions and giggles are always where it’s at!" Then I can adjust my grade level and enter "Cat in the Hat" as my character.

We could stop there if we wanted to and just start a preview of our chat. As you test it out, you might decide that you want to give more instructions to the AI. To do that, click the "Additional Fields" toggle where you can add learning objectives and directions for the AI.

For my example, I listed my learning goal as "To help students learn about rhyming." Then under Additional Instructions, I explained how I wanted the conversation to go:

Before I entered all of this, I had a cool activity where students could just talk to The Cat in the Hat about whatever they wanted, but now I have a structured learning activity that differentiates for students who struggle or excel.

Now how do we get this to the students? After you've previewed it and are happy with how it works, you can click the "Save to Room" button at the top. It will take you to this screen where you can give your Room a name and description and opt to set a start and end time for the Room or require students to sign in with SSO (sign in with Google for example). Note - if you have any desire to share the finished Room with a teacher (like I'm about to do), DO NOT require SSO. But if you are just using it with students, this is a great option for students to get back into their chat later and ensure that they are using their real name.

Now I can click "Save room." This will give me a join link to share or give me the option to assign it to Google Classroom. Now for the fun part...go test it out!!

Hopefully you noticed that students have to acknowledge some things before they even start with the Room. This may be a bit complex for younger students, but it is great for the older kids to see to learn about using AI responsibly.

Once the students start working, the teacher gets a cool Dashboard that shows them how the students are doing. Teachers can click on each student to see a full transcript and AI generated insights.

As you can see, this is a great way to determine which students are excelling and which students need additional support, either with the content or with staying on task and appropriate.

This example just used one single Student Tool, but you can also feel free to explore adding multiple tools to your Room! For this one, it might be fun to add an Image Generator to let the students create an image related to their rhyming story!

Go ahead and explore the available Student Tools and see what kind of engaging activities you can create for your own students!