One of the many great features of SchoolAI is their assistants, which can help teachers with a variety of specific tasks. Personally, I use the Co-Teacher assistant as my go-to chatbot for basic questions or support, but there are others to support you with things like developing new curriculum, planning a field trip, researching, and grading essays:
The Essay Grading Assistant is not new, but they did just recently add a new feature that allows you to upload an entire class worth of essays all at once! Basically, you first attach your rubric for the essay and then you upload all the student essays (or other piece of writing). Like magic, the assistant goes through all of them and provides feedback based on the rubric...and even scores them and provides an actual grade!
REMINDER...just like we don't want students to simply enter a prompt into AI and copy and paste the results - we also don't want you to do that as teachers. AI is not you. AI does not know your students. AI may not even know some of your content. Use this assistant as a support tool, but be sure to review the results it provides and then make your own decisions and provide students with your own feedback and your own grade.
So how does it work? Well first you will want to log into SchoolAI and go to the Assistants tab. Then click the "Chat" button under "Essay Grading Assistant". From there, you will see a popup to "Try the new Essay Grader" (I suspect this will eventually move somewhere else, but for now this is the only way to access it and it is in beta!)
From there, click the "New Session" button and then enter the details about the assignment and more importantly - the rubric. I suggest uploading the rubric (either as a pdf or a Google Doc) rather than copying and pasting it, but you can choose to do either.
Once you've done that, you can click the "Create session" button at the bottom. Now you need to "drop" the student work into the right side of the page.
This is the part that is tiny bit more complicated - it does not currently allow you to pull files from Google Drive, so you will need to download them to your computer first. The easiest thing is to have them all in a folder (which you probably already do if you use Google Classroom for submissions) and then download the whole folder. If you need help doing this step, please reach out!
Once they are downloaded, drag and drop them from your computer into SchoolAI and it will immediately start writing up feedback and creating grades. Click on the essay title to see the more detailed feedback. The feedback will be based on your rubric:
As an added bonus (or an alternative), this tool also has the ability to launch a website designed for students that will allow them to copy and paste their writing and see this same suggested grade and feedback. This will give students an opportunity to get suggestions on their work before submitting it! To do that, just click the "Student AI Feedback Link" icon and share the link with your students.
Take some time to give this new tool a try and see if you agree with the grades and feedback and consider using it with your students. As always, remind yourself and your students that AI is a tool, not an intelligent person. Take all of its feedback with a grain of salt and always trust yourself more than you trust the machine.
*Note that all examples in shown here (assignment, rubric, essays) were generated entirely by AI for the purposes of this example.*
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