Month: July 2025

I’ll be the first to admit that I have always been fascinated by new technology and computer innovation. But I know not everyone shares my enthusiasm. I have come across a number of friends and acquaintances who do not share my welcome of AI or enthusiasm for its potential.

A number of valid criticisms emerge from articles on AI, especially in education. Student abuse is a primary concern. This is worse than the old days where some students had an older sibling who wrote some of their papers for them. AI assistants are freely accessed on multiple devices and are experts in every field. Students who use them to do assignments for school are doing a “cognitive offloading” that means they may not learn what is intended. Honestly, I believe that there is a huge crop of new graduates who are getting away with this in this time period during which educational practices are trying to catch up. Can firms really trust any diploma granted between 2022 and whenever? I teach online and solving this problem has occupied an enormous amount of my prep time.

The natural resources necessary to run AI are enormous. In typical insensitive capitalist fashion, in some places large tech firms are sucking in vast amounts of electricity and water to support AI data centers at the expense of their neighbors and the environment.

I have seen articles from students who are angry that their teachers are using AI to grade their work or that the powerpoint and class materials were AI-generated.

But I am still not scared.

Socrates lamented the invention of writing because students who become literate will fail to develop their memory. (Plato, Phaedrus 274c-275b).

In the 15th century, an Italian scribe Filippo de Strata railed against the new printing press technology. He said it was a threat to the artistry of manuscripts and potential for moral corruption (Latin address to Doge Nicolò Marcello, written between 1473 and 1474). So too was Abbot Johannes Trithemius worried it would foster idleness among monks and diminish the spiritual benefits of hand-copying (In Praise of Scribes).

When I was in middle school in the late 1970s, handheld calculators just became kind of affordable (my first one, a birthday gift, was over $100!). Older people said this was cheating and that kids would lose the ability to do math in their heads. (Okay, so for those of us already bad at math, this was either prescient or irrelevant.)

In the year before I retired, I had a parent conference with a mom and her kids who had been homeschooled up to then. She spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of good penmanship that she had instilled in her children and chided the schools for no longer teaching cursive. I smiled and nodded whilst thinking that once outside the family foyer these kids will never pen anything longer than their signature.

I know, this is a good place for an eye-roll emoji. The reader may feel that an accusation of Luddism is hyperbole. But I think the analogy is apt. New technologies call into question old practices and it is tempting to hold on to them because we have already mastered them, because we have already invested so much in mastering them, because we value them for that reason. Instructors who have been teaching for years have their favorite assignments and projects that worked for years and now are unworkable because students will have an AI do it. They will have to let those go.

My experience last semester teaching AP French for an online school offered me many lessons in this very thing. When I took over the course from another instructor whose schedule had changed, I discovered that the students had been using translators for all of their work and not being challenged on it. I made it my mission to thwart AI abuse in that course (see related blog posts), so I truly sympathize with the reader who thinks AI will destroy education.

But I’m still not scared of AI.

Like virtually all other technologies that radically transform, the transformation period is stressful. Where is this going? How will this affect me? My job?

This technological transformation is coming, like it or not. Like writing, printing, calculating, and similar “cognitive offloading” tools, this will come because it is too good to too many people for it to be just dropped. At first, because it’s new, there will be an adjustment period. But society will adapt and evolve and rebalance because that is where our interest lies.

I don’t think AI is scary. I think AI is powerful.

And like any powerful tool, what matters is who wields it, and how.

Innovation‘s framework for harnessing AI encompasses a set of strategies to maximize the new technology’s practical value. Few teachers just want to set their students loose on a chatbot! Innovation’s chat is corralled by important guardrails: interactions have a pre-set limited number, chats are recorded for later viewing and evaluation, and the AI response style is pre-set by the teacher. This provides the important bridle for the AI’s responses, setting age group and purpose for the chat.

Our company name “Innovation Assessments” is a little archaic to be sure. It dates back to a time when we were just a test generator site. That being the case, it should be said that evaluation still plays an important role in all our applications. This week, we added an AI grading assistant to the chat evaluations.

Imagine an assignment to a tenth grade social studies student to chat with the AI or with another student on the causes of the French Revolution. How well did they complete the task? Was their time chatting with the AI time well-spent? Did the student try to generate insightful responses to the AI’s questions and challenges? Did the student use the prompts wisely?

Imagine a student of French, CEFR level B, practicing with the AI to order a meal in a restaurant and to solve a problem with their order. Same questions: how well did they use their time with the chatbot? Did they achieve the objective of the dialogue?

Two applications exist for evaluating student participation in a chat. The main individual scoring application is found from the playlist controls for the task under the Task dropdown. Choose “Score”.

The build-in rubric lets teachers assess the quality, etiquette, appropriateness, and form of the student’s work. Click “AI Score” to get the AI’s suggested score.

Like all of the AI assistants at Innovation, the application is designed to present AI work product for teacher approval before being saved or presented to students.

The original scoring mode is still installed. Teachers run the chat program from the course playlist and then click Scoring Mode from the buttons on the left of screen.

Each chat is organized into a thread with a nickname (the name of a world capital city). This feature is useful for scoring chats between students in the class and that was how it was originally developed. The AI scoring assistant is installed here as well.

At Innovation Assessments, we believe in empowering teachers with tools that not only streamline their work but also deepen their understanding of student progress. AI-Assisted Chat Scoring is a testament to this commitment, transforming how you evaluate conversational learning while ensuring you remain in control. We’re excited for you to experience how this new feature, alongside our existing robust evaluation tools, will revolutionize the way you foster engaging and effective student interactions.

At Innovation, we know where we fit — and just as importantly, where we don’t. We understand that tools like Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas have become the backbone of digital learning for many schools. Districts invest in these platforms for their compatibility, reporting features, and teacher training.

And that’s fine with us.

Innovation is a full-featured learning management system in its own right, but we don’t expect to replace the LMS you already rely on. Instead, we complement it. Our design philosophy is simple: Innovation plugs into the LMS you already use — quickly, easily, and effectively.

Seamless Integration Through Links

If your LMS allows you to include external links (and almost all of them do), then you can integrate Innovation activities in minutes. Here’s how:

• One-Click Links to Activities:
  Every Innovation learning task can generate a unique external link. Just click the link button next to an activity, copy it, and paste it directly into a module, assignment, or announcement in your LMS.
• Link Lists for Topics:
  Want to include an entire sequence of activities? Use the Link List option from the Topic control dropdown. It instantly creates a formatted list of links to all activities within that topic, ready to paste into your LMS for students to access in order.
• Evaluation Links:
  When it comes time to assess student work, Innovation makes it just as easy. The Evaluation button produces a link to the task scoresheet, which you can paste into your LMS, email to students, or drop into a video conference chat.

Works With Your Live Sessions

Innovation also shines in live teaching environments. If you’re conducting sessions over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, Innovation integrates seamlessly:

• Start your live session in your chosen platform.
• Open the relevant Innovation activity in your browser.
• Share your screen as you guide students through the task.
• With a single click, generate a participation link and paste it into the video conference chat so students can follow along or complete tasks simultaneously.

Why This Matters

Teachers don’t need another siloed platform to manage. You already have enough logins, dashboards, and gradebooks to juggle. With Innovation, you get powerful, purpose-built learning activities that fit into your existing workflow without disruption.

We believe in meeting teachers and students where they already are — which, for many of you, is inside your district’s LMS. Innovation gives you the flexibility to enrich your LMS with engaging, structured learning tasks and robust evaluation tools — without asking you to abandon what’s already working.

The new AI educational assistant chat app at Innovation is definitely one of our most popular applications! It is extremely flexible and reliable for delivering structured, natural, and appropriate interactive learning.

Readers may recall that the Innovation chat feature can be hosted or host-less and can include AI interactions. Teachers license students for a certain number of interactions and teachers define in advance the “reply style” of the AI. This means that teachers set up important guidelines to make the learning experience most effective.

In response to teacher feedback, we’ve added a new set of age group reply style options to help the AI adjust its language and tone even more precisely to the students it interacts with. Alongside the existing CEFR-level options (for world language learning) and conversational styles, teachers can now specify an age group — such as upper elementary, junior high, high school, or college — when configuring the chat assistant.

These age group settings guide the AI to choose vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone that are more appropriate and engaging for the selected audience. For example, when set to upper elementary, the AI uses simpler words and a more encouraging tone; when set to college, it uses a more formal and intellectually challenging style.

We encourage teachers to select one or two complementary styles rather than many at once, to keep the AI’s responses focused and consistent. As always, settings can be adjusted at any time, allowing teachers to fine-tune the experience based on their students’ needs and goals.

We’re excited to see how teachers use these new options to tailor conversations even more effectively. You can find the new age group settings in the AI Reply Style section of the chat setup page, alongside the existing style options. As always, we welcome your feedback — let us know how the chat assistant is working for your students and what additional refinements would make it even more useful.

Innovation’s AI integrations are expanding this summer, with enhancements to all areas of our platform!

This week, we’re excited to announce that AI support has been added to our grammar application, designed for learners of world languages.

The grammar app presents prompts for students to practice applying rules in their target language — such as verb conjugations, adjective agreement, spelling, and more.

Last spring, we introduced AI tools for teachers to easily generate customized grammar tasks.

This month, we’ve added AI assistance for students as they complete the tasks. Teachers can license students for a set number of AI assists during an exercise. After entering and saving their response to a prompt, students can click ✨ Ask AI to receive feedback.

When errors are detected, the AI provides thoughtful hints to guide students toward correcting and improving their answers — encouraging learning and mastery, rather than simply giving away the correct answer.

The best way to sum up Innovation’s support of mastery learning is customization. A foundational principal of mastery learning is to identify areas where students need more work and then to provide that practice.

Innovation’s data analysis tools, including AI supported analyses, facilitate accurate and speedy identification of areas for continued student support.

Innovation’s AI teaching assistant makes generating these customized training and study tasks very efficient, effective, and rapid.

Mastery learning is an instructional approach in which students progress at their own pace, demonstrating a high level of understanding through frequent formative assessments and targeted corrective feedback before moving on to new material. By design—clear goals, adaptive pathways, real-time feedback, and built-in remediation—the Innovation platform strongly supports a mastery learning approach.

Mastery learning begins at finding out where the students are. Pretests assessing prior knowledge are important to find students’ entry point into the curriculum. At Innovation, pretests are easily constructed (especially true with AI integrations for assessment creation and data analysis) and saved to teachers’ course list for later re-use.

In a mastery learning approach, students have regular opportunities for formative assessment and to track their progress. At Innovation, task development and assessment is strongly supported by artificial intelligence. Instant scoring and annotated feedback in “debriefing” mode both help support the kind of formative feedback so important to track progress and chart the course.

Data-driven decision making is a cornerstone of the mastery learning class. Innovation’s proctor AI tracks student activity and progress and reports useful summaries with analysis to guide the next steps.

So let’s think about what makes mastery learning difficult to implement. Designing varied, on-level practice problems is a hill to climb. Writing multiple versions of questions (with different contexts, difficulty levels, etc.) to hit each student’s zone of proximal development can be very time consuming.

But that’s where Innovation truly shines: removing the friction from implementation.

One of the greatest barriers to mastery learning in traditional classrooms is the sheer labor it demands. Teachers are already stretched thin, and the work of creating varied, on-level practice tasks tailored to individual needs — often in multiple formats and difficulty bands — can seem insurmountable. Similarly, analyzing formative data, spotting patterns, and designing the right interventions in a timely way is hard when done manually.

Innovation helps teachers overcome these hurdles. Our AI tools generate differentiated practice materials in seconds, informed by real student data. They can craft multiple versions of an assessment item that target different skill levels or learning gaps, and even suggest scaffolded supports or enrichment challenges for advanced learners.

What’s more, Innovation’s platform makes tracking progress and growth transparent for both teacher and student. Students can see their own progress through clear visualizations and feedback, helping build motivation and ownership of learning. Teachers, in turn, can make quick, informed decisions about who needs more support, who’s ready to advance, and what kinds of practice will be most effective for each learner.

At its heart, mastery learning is about equity — ensuring every student has the time, support, and resources to truly master each concept before being pushed forward. Innovation empowers teachers to deliver on that promise, making mastery learning not only possible, but practical and scalable.

With Innovation, mastery learning becomes less of an ideal and more of a reality: a personalized pathway for every learner, supported by data, driven by AI, and guided by the teacher’s expertise.

I think we are all still finding our way in using AI in education. Recent surveys show many students and teachers are using AI. Consistent with what we have seen in previous technological changes that become adopted into education, they must be adapted from their design origins in the adult workplace. That adaptation is what Innovation intends to enable. 

In earlier posts, I described the importance of “guardrails” in 21st century learning spaces for students. Adults who depend on a digital workspace are largely self-directed. They shut off notifications that distract. They focus their attention on completing the at hand. They manage digital resources and devices so as to keep them working smoothly (limit the number of tabs open in a browser and keep them working smoothly keyboard clean). Students, even older high school students, possess fewer of these self-disciplines. Youngsters are by nature more slaves to their impulses than many adults, so incorporating AI in the classroom should include the kinds of externally-imposed guardrails analogous to those we imposed in our classrooms in real space. 

There is a growing number of AI integrations at Innovation that allow students to interact with AI in their lessons here. For one, there is the chat feature where students can discuss a topic and even practice another language with the AI. This offers an opportunity for practice that includes important guardrails. The principal one is the “license”. 

At Innovation, any application where AI faces students is designed with limits selected by the teacher in advance. This is the license. 

Firstly, the license limits the number of interactions between the student and the AI on that particular task. This will pose an obstacle to wandering off topic or incurring unnecessary costs (since AI interactions are metered in subscriptions to the service). In the chat application and in the asynchronous discussion app, students are reminded at the start that there is a particular objective to be met within a certain number of turns at conversation. With practice, this should keep most students on task and avoid conversations to nowhere. 

Secondly, the teacher sets the AI’s reply style when creating licenses for students on an application. Settings include age level of the students, the attitude of the replies (scholarly debater? Challenging devil’s advocate? Chatty dialogue partner?) and for language learners the difficulty level of the chat on the CEFR scale (A1, B2, etc). The AI can help keep the student on track and offer suggestions for improved student contributions. 

Now, you could log in to ChatGPT and have students type all these guidelines into the prompt field and then engage in the educational exercise, but the impracticality of that is obvious. 

Besides the license configuration, two additional guardrails at Innovation are that all interactions are recorded and all are set up to be evaluated. This gives teachers important supervisory powers. They can see what the student said to AI and evaluate the effectiveness of the interaction. 

AI integrations at Innovation extend beyond synchronous chat and asynchronous discussion forums. The grammar application, for example, also offers AI licenses. 

The grammar application is designed to help students learn grammatical structures in another language. It presents cues of various kinds such as incomplete sentences or short structures to conjugate or decline. There is an AI integration that teachers can license such that the AI gives advice on the answers, such as hints at correcting mistakes or praise for correct responses. Like with chat and discussion, teachers set the number of interactions and the style of the reply in advance. Interactions are recorded; responses are set up for evaluation. 

Adopting AI in education means adapting the technology to the educational context. It must account for maturity level, for targeted skills, and work within boundaries of the current unit or module’s content objectives. The “licensing” concept at Innovation is an important part of that adaptation. If you are not a subscriber, why not sign up for our 60-day free trial?