A new academic year means lots of new advancements in the use of AI! My favourite new addition to Microsoft Teams for Education is the use of AI to enhance assignment instructions & create rubrics for assignments.
By using AI to enhance assignments you can type one sentence into the instructions box for the assignment & let AI do the rest! The AI that is already embedded in the app will Add Steps, Learning Objectives & create a rubric for students.
All the teacher needs to do is enter a clear one sentence instruction to allow the AI generated options to appear.
Click “Add Detail” to allow AI to give students more detailed instructions as to how to complete the assignment, as shown below:
By clicking regenerate, it will give you different options for the instructions, some more detailed & some with less detail, so that you can choose what best fits your students. Bare in mind you only get 10 regenerations per assignment! Once you are happy with the steps & they layout, click keep it!
AI will also create clear & concise Learning Objectives for the students if you click “Add Learning Objectives”
For shorter instructions go straight to “Add Steps” instead of “Add Detail” & that will result in what is shown below:
If this is still information overload for your students, clicking “simplfy” will make it easier to read for the students, as shown below:
You can take a step further & allow the AI to assist in creating a rubric for your assignment.
Click the “Add rubric” option when creating the assignment, this will give you the option to create one from scratch or use AI. Once you’ve chosen to create a rubric using AI, you will have to enter some information to help it out!
Give the rubric a title, choose the language & give clear instructions as to what you want the rubric to evaluate:
Then you will chose the grade it is aimed at, this is the American system, so just ensure the grade aligns with your students level. You can also edit the scale, I have edited the scale to have the same scale levels as the Junior Cycle CBA grading, to get my students familiar with this grading scale. AI will prompt you with the criteria for the rubric based on the information already generated in the instruction section.
Once all the information is correct & you click “Create rubric using AI”, it will generate your rubric & save it so that it can be used again. Students can view the rubric & you can use it when grading the assignment!
With very little input from the teacher, students have an assignment with clear instructions, learning objectives & a rubric to follow!!