Category: AI at Innovation

Innovation is proud to introduce its newest learning tool: structured AI chat.

We created this feature to empower students to practice conversations and engage with course material outside of class time. Although originally designed for world language learners, our AI chat works beautifully across disciplines, making it a versatile resource for content-based courses as well.

At Innovation, we believe technology should enhance learning in structured, meaningful ways. We call our applications “21st-century learning spaces“—they’re carefully designed to meet educational best practices and support student growth.

Teachers have two powerful ways to use AI chat: hosted or hostless.

The AI’s responses follow strict, teacher-defined parameters.

Hosted Chat: This mirrors Innovation’s original synchronous chat app where teachers facilitated real-time conversations between students. The key difference? Now, students can be paired with AI personas instead of classmates.

Hostless Chat: These are independent, self-paced chat assignments that students can complete on their own. But they’re not free-for-alls—the guardrails are still firmly in place:

The chat transcript is automatically recorded.

Students have a limited number of turns with the AI.

Students are always responsible to start the conversation. When the chat starts, the assignment is clear and the AI’s interaction protocols are clearly stated.

The AI persona will keep the student on track even if they attempt to distract it with irrelevant questions.

Once completed, Innovation provides an app to evaluate the quality of the student’s interactions in the chat.

This summer, I will add an AI grading assistant to help assess student work in a chat.

While this was initially envisioned for language students, its use in teaching content became clear. In this example, we set up these parameters for the AI persona:

By the way, teachers can optionally include “accessories” such as a PDF article or a video for students to review before discussion.

Here is how our chat with the Ai started for a critical discussion of the causes of the French revolution.

Our sample conversation went on like this:

Ever true to the parameters set for it, the AI persists in challenging the student to think more deeply and clearly define their points.

The AI chat feature at Innovation has great potential to enrich assignments and promote critical thinking in content courses and linguistic fluency in language classes. Try it out!

Users may have noted the new AI Dashboard in their control panel at Innovation and the new pricing tiers that reference “AI tokens”. What are AI tokens and what can you do with them?

Innovation is integrating AI into every one of its applications now. It is not only a place to teach and learn, it is now a place to create high quality resources to support teaching and learning!

Subscribers to Innovation now have a certain allotment of tokens per month. A “token” is a fundamental unit of text that large language models (LLMs) use to process and generate language. It can be a word, a part of a word, or even a punctuation mark. When you interact with an AI model, your input (prompts) and the model’s output (responses) are broken down into tokens. The cost of using AI services is directly tied to the number of tokens processed. Generally, the more tokens used, the higher the cost. Because Innovation pays per token used via OpenAI, your monthly token allotment is designed to balance value and cost in a fair, transparent way.

During development, I maintained a logging script to see how many tokens I used to complete the various tasks. Unsurprisingly, essay grading is our most token-intensive task, averaging around 1881 tokens per interaction.
Vocabulary List Generation is the least token-intensive, consuming significantly fewer tokens.

Of course, token usage varies widely. Some teachers provide detailed outlines when asking the AI to generate tests or discussion prompts based on video or reading material. Others might use the AI heavily for grading essays or enabling student chat discussions. Your usage will shape how far your tokens go.

At the “pro” tier, you get 100,000 AI tokens / month. This resets every 30 days from the date you have a paid subscription. So what can you do with that? Well, based on my own usage (remember, I teach remotely part-time out of Innovation myself!) …

So, what does 100,000 AI tokens actually look like in practice for a teacher? Well, based on my own usage, it’s quite a lot of creative power at your fingertips! For example, you could grade around 53 essays (that’s right, those token-intensive ones!), or generate over 130 sets of test questions for your classes. Need a quick conversation starter for a foreign language class or a debate prompt? You could generate almost 180 conversations. And if you’re building vocabulary, you’re in luck – you could create an incredible 877 vocabulary lists with that many tokens! It really opens up a world of possibilities for creating high-quality teaching and learning resources.