UPDATE 4/19/2023: I’ve written about a few other AI tools specifically designed for teachers such as Curipod and Would You Rather Generator. I’ve also written about how I’ve used Chat GPT for differentiation ideas. To find these articles and a plethora of links to sites that will help you teach your students about Artificial Intelligence, you can visit my Wakelet collection here.
Conker AI can be added to the growing list of artificial intelligence tools that can help support teachers – especially if you work in a Google district. Like Curipod and ChatGPT which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Conker is new and working its way to becoming a more robust tool, meaning that it does not have a lot of bells and whistles yet. It’s also not COPPA compliant, so I would not recommend letting students use it. To use it, you will need to give the app permissions to access your Google Drive. Although that has become a standard practice with many apps and extensions, it’s still something to be careful about. Conker comes to us from Mote, which many educators already use to give voice notes, so that’s a point in its favor when it comes to trustworthiness. But we all know how easily technology can be abused, unfortunately.
Despite my cautiousness, I couldn’t resist trying out Conker because it offers a new twist to harnessing AI power for mundane tasks. With Conker, you can generate quizzes, fill-in-the-blank activities, true/false questions and more that can then be easily exported to a Google Form. (Exporting to PDF and sharing the initial quiz using a link are apparently upcoming features that are not currently available.)
When you first log in to Conker (currently free), you will see a prompt like the one below.
When you click on any of the underlined parts in the prompt, you will get a drop-down menu so you can select a different option, such as a Reading Comprehension activity instead of a Quiz, the number and type of questions and any grade level from K-Adult. Give it the topic you would like it to create questions for, and watch the magic happen. You can alternatively use your own source material by copying and pasting the text in after clicking on that link under “Generate.” You can see my demonstration below.
The advantage of being to export this to a Google Form, of course, is that you can then easily assign it to students and even set up the form as a graded quiz.
Though I am a proponent of creativity, project-based learning, and open-ended questions in the classroom, there is obviously a place for formative assessments like this to be used as exit tickets or at other times to quickly gauge the understanding of your students and make decisions about how to move forward. Another value of this tool is that you can also use it to make quick differentiated activities for students of diverse ability levels by changing the type of question and the grade level. I wouldn’t depend on it to be completely accurate at targeting ability levels, but it does give you something to start with that you can modify quickly rather than beginning with a blank page.
Teachers are drowning right now and time is always their most valuable commodity. Artificial intelligence can be extremely helpful in reducing preparation time so teachers can do what they will always do best — give individual students the guidance and support they each need.
