Education Copilot

Education Copilot is a web-based AI platform intended to help teachers automate the creation of classroom materials like lesson plans, slide decks, and worksheets. Once users create a free account, they can use the AI prompt "tools" in the Workshop to create content like discussion questions, study guides, and PowerPoint presentations on a subject of their choice. There's also a handy recipe for generating email text, with fill-in-the-blank forms for items like progress reports and parent emails. Users can tweak their requests and regenerate content swiftly, and all of their created content is accessible on the platform's History page. Additionally, teachers can use the Unit Planner to create a suite of tools for an entire course unit. Teachers can input the topic, grade level and subject, number of lessons, and additional information about the lesson overview and learning objectives for the unit. Then, the tool will create a series of lesson plans, handouts, context builder handouts, and recommended related YouTube videos. 

Users can create up to five items for free; after that, they can't edit or delete what they've created. Users with an annual or monthly subscription can create an unlimited number of items.

This is an interesting tool to help teachers explore how they might use AI-generated content in their teaching practice. Among the many AI-powered tools for education emerging recently, Education Copilot stands out for its recipes and its customization features. The Unit Planner and the email generators are especially intriguing: It's terrific that educators can input a ton of information about what they plan to cover in a unit and then use this tool to structure their lesson and generate related documents for teachers and students. The email generators are helpful too: Teachers can input details and the platform will arrange those details into sentences in a text editing box, and then teachers can customize the message to better reflect their own voice. In general, this tool might be most valuable for helping teachers refine how they use AI tools to automate certain tasks: Getting some help starting an emotionally charged email can make that process go faster. Using a digital tool to organize, chunk, and structure a large volume of information can be a helpful way to make a massive task more manageable. 

As with any AI tool, the big drawback is with the reliability of the information on hand. There's little transparency about the platform's developers or its function: The developer's address seems to be a residential location in rural Texas, and the site's privacy policy (which isn't linked from the homepage) includes language about users of this product complying with the privacy policies for Google products without explanation. Most importantly, there is no information about what AI tool powers this product and what data it uses to generate content. It's likely using a large-language model (which is the underlying tool involved with ChatGPT and other products), but there's no information about how the product works beyond broad claims about its effectiveness. As a result, there's no clear sense of the sources of the information that's being used to create the AI-generated output here. 

Consequently, if teachers use the tools that require less teacher input—like "Create a PowerPoint about the Roman Empire for seventh grade history"—they'll get output that's short on details but likely correct in its broad strokes. This means that teachers will have to review those resources for accuracy and suitability for their classroom—which they would have done anyway with some other ready-made classroom content from a reputable publisher. Overall, Education Copilot works best when teachers bring the details and use the tool to structure and refine them. The platform is meant to be a copilot, after all, not the captain of the ship.