Our Tools

Our tools are designed for use individually by teachers, tutors, and everyone engaged in teaching. We also hope that our tools and understanding of teaching can support teacher educators in their teaching of teachers by integrating our tools into professional development and teacher preparation coursework.

Download Directions for Teachers Using Our Tools in Professional Development

Download Directions for Teacher Educators Using Our Tools as Part of Teacher Education Courses and Programs

Why Digital Tools are Needed in Teacher Learning

Interactions among teachers and students in real classrooms are unique, embedded in context, unpredictable, and constantly changing (Zeichner, 2010). These dynamic conditions create obstacles for developing and measuring growth in specific teaching practices. The opportunity for practice may or may not occur and the amount of repetition and time needed for teacher thinking and reflection is typically not present in the rapid pace of a school day.

Digital tools enable us to create dynamic learning opportunities that feel realistic but provide feedback and opportunities not available in real time classroom teaching. For example, during digital practice teachers can fast forward to the most difficult part of the teaching practice and repeat just that part over and over. There is no need to practice an easy introduction. The avatar students don’t retain learning from teaching practice sessions, so they always start at the beginning of a lesson. Our tools provide real time feedback so that teachers can engage in deliberate practice to build specific teaching expertise. In addition, we hope that using computing and digital literacy tools spark teacher curiosity and encourages the development and integration of computing and digital literacies in their teaching.

We have used the Computing Integrated Teacher Education Framework to guide the ongoing development and research of our educator professional development tools.

AI Engine

Teaching with Grace is powered by a machine learning system that has been trained based on English language models using wit.ai. The team developed a language model by first observing hundreds of teachers engaging in teaching tasks similar to those used in Teaching with Grace. After developing possible teacher responses, the responses were translated into different languages (e.g. Spanish and French) and then back to English to develop a training data set. Teaching with Grace uses this language model to analyze teacher feedback given to avatar students and can currently code teacher feedback into five different purposes (i.e. general, clarify, reflect, redirect, and think).

Student responses were created by the development team. Student responses are not generated by AI. There are a finite number of student responses that have been constructed to express feelings of belonging, academic language, knowledge, and thinking. Students do not have a stereo-typical profile. Avatar students express strengths and needs based in response to the task and context.

 

Cite this Software

Teaching with Grace is released under the MIT license https://github.com/bferster/liza

Agility is released under the MIT license https://github.com/bferster/agame