Category: Teaching Social Studies

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?

This application is for our world language teachers. The Directed Conversation is a training and evaluation tool for world language courses for conversational fluency. Notably, readers may recognize this format as that used in the AP French exam.

Innovation has two apps of note here. One is the generator, the other is the app to conduct a directed conversation.

The Generator

The generator lets teachers create, with optional assist from AI, a directed conversation at the level they need for their students. Innovation uses the “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages” (CEFR)) standard to define linguistic competence at various levels. The CEFR is widely used to assess and compare the language proficiency of learners across different languages and educational systems. To run the generator, teachers complete the basic form:

Once set, teachers can use the AI integration to generate a conversation according to the criteria they set. Once checking and editing, teachers can save the task to use with students.

Conversation Levels in Our App: What They Look Like

🌱 A Level – Beginner (Student-Directed Conversations)

• Conversations are simple and highly structured.
• The instructor’s lines are fully written out in the target language, like a script.
• The student sees step-by-step English instructions for what to do (e.g., “Ask for a drink”), but they are not given exact words to say.
• Focus: The student practices basic survival phrases and predictable interactions, like ordering food or asking for directions.
• Example format:
  • Student – Ask for a table for two.
  • Instructor – Bien sûr, par ici.

🔹 B Level – Intermediate (Improvised, Goal-Based Conversations)

At this level, conversations are more flexible and involve guided improvisation.

There are two conversation types:

• Instructor Starts:
  The instructor follows prompts written in the target language to improvise their parts.
  The student’s tasks remain in English as communicative goals (e.g., “Ask the price”).
• Student Starts:
  The student leads the conversation by following English prompts (e.g., “Explain your travel plans”).
  The instructor follows prompts in the target language to guide the conversation, but now both participants are improvising.
• Focus: Building the ability to navigate everyday situations and handle less predictable responses.

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🔸 C Level – Advanced (Fully Improvised, High-Level Conversations)

These conversations are complex, nuanced, and resemble real-life discussions.

There are two conversation types:

• Instructor Starts:
  Both student and instructor follow target-language prompts (e.g., “Express surprise”, “Invite the other person to develop an idea”).
  No English is used in the conversation setup.
• Student Starts:
  The student leads using target-language prompts to achieve communicative goals.
  The instructor follows improvisation cues also written in the target language.
• Focus: Encouraging spontaneous, natural conversation with sophisticated language, similar to what’s expected in AP-level or advanced real-world exchanges.

The directed conversation app can be used with one or a group of students. This app has many tools to facilitate either interaction, presumably over a video conferencing app.

• As students complete their turn, the teacher can mark the line complete so that both can keep track of where they are in conversation.
• If it is an assessment, the teacher can score the student’s turn.
• If it is a practice and teachers enter new words or phrases that students request into the “useful words” text field, it is possible to make flashcards practice right away.
• If it is a class, students can be sent a join link and can be prompted to record something of what they hear in their classmates’ response.

Give our directed conversation (conversations dirigée) app a try today!

An article in the New York Times caught my eye yesterday. The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It read the title. For the past six weeks, I have been coding AI integrations into Innovation. It caught my eye because I have been thinking a lot about AI in education. From the perspective of a teacher, it drives me crazy when my students submit ChatGPT-generated work and pass it off as their own. The cartwheels I have to do as a remote instructor to prevent this are pretty byzantine!

But I am also interested as a businessman. I aim to enliven innovation (and raise its notoriety) by the integration of OpenAI in every aspect of the site. During this feverish coding period since mid-April when we got our API key, I have coded apps that…

• generate multiple-choice questions for tests, reading comprehension, videos, and Jeopardy-style games;
• score short answer responses based on guidelines and model answers;
• score longer essays based on rubrics and instructor-designed guidelines;
• interact with students in online forum discussions;
• generate composition topics and dictée practices for world language teachers;
• generate custom grammar exercises for world language instructors.

Through the summer, I plan to add some sophisticated AI analysis options for student essays as well as rubric generators and a monitored chat.

In the New York Times article, student Ella Stapleton was a senior at Northeastern University. Her professor had used ChatGPT to generate lecture notes and failed to remove the telltale signs of its origin. Another student found that the comments a professor left on one of her assignments included the chat with an AI to help grade it. One student is suing her university, saying she was paying for instruction from the prof and not from an AI. Are they right to be annoyed?

Readers are no doubt familiar with the Talmud, a central work of Jewish thought composed of rabbinic debates spanning centuries. These debates often wrestle with how to interpret and apply biblical law to real or hypothetical situations. A hallmark of Talmudic reasoning is the use of analogy: to what extent does a current case resemble one already discussed and resolved?

This is the approach I would like to take in arguing specific ethical considerations regarding the use of AI by instructors. I began teaching in 1991. If we assume ethical principles to be fairly static, since right and wrong should probably not really change much, then what was right then is still right now.

In 1991, a public school teacher would have access to a commercially published textbook. This would typically come with a package of pre-made tests and answer keys, workbooks for subject-specific practice, maybe filmstrips or posters, and so forth. It was the common understanding that teachers were not expected to write their own textbooks or even design every one of their own lesson activities.

In 1991, a college professor would typically teach using a commercially published textbook selected for the course. Along with the textbook came instructor guides, test banks, lecture slides, and other supplemental materials provided by the publisher. Professors might adapt these resources, but it was generally understood that they were not expected to create every reading, assignment, or exam from scratch. The role of the professor centered more on guiding discussion, delivering lectures, and evaluating student work than on developing entirely original curricula for each course.

With regard to assessment, my teachers in the 1970s in my grammar school sometimes used a Scantron machine to score those tests where you fill in the bubble. They did not score the tests all by hand. My elementary classes were 35-40 kids to a class in a parochial inner-city school.

When I was teaching social studies here in New York State just before I retired, I was called upon each June to drive far away to meet with colleagues from other districts to score the essay portions of the New York State Regents exams. Two teachers graded each paper and we discussed the merits and the score.

In 1991, assessment at the college level often meant midterms, finals, and a handful of major papers or projects. In large lecture courses, teaching assistants might handle the grading of essays, quizzes, or lab reports, following rubrics or guidelines set by the professor. While professors were ultimately responsible for student evaluation, it was common for them to delegate portions of the grading process, especially in high-enrollment classes. The expectation wasn’t that every piece of student work would receive personalized feedback from the lead instructor, but rather that grading would be efficient, consistent, and scalable.

Returning to the students who are upset with their professors for using AI to generate lecture notes or to generate student evaluations, I think we can reason by analogy as did those Talmudic scholars in times past to ascertain what is right.

My premise, and this is after many hours of working with AI over a year or more, is that at this particular moment in history, the best AI has to offer is to be a rather naive, but sometimes insightful, young assistant. My teachers reviewed the commercially published tests and checked for typos and accurate keys. My professors supervised their teaching assistants, providing them guidelines and checking their work. My AI helpers, who at the moment are ChatGPT and Gemini, need guidance and supervision by me.

Commercially published textbooks, tests, workbooks, worksheets, and the like have been acceptable and welcomed for a century. No one would have asked the one room schoolhouse teacher to publish her own grammar books. No one would have faulted a full professor for having his assistant grade lab reports. In 1991, and this is before the demands of differentiating instruction, the teacher was the creative director of a plan to educate using resources that they had vetted and sometimes using assistants that they supervised. At the time, this arrangement was both normal and uncontroversial.

The introduction of AI as a source of learning or an assessment tool doesn’t diminish the instructor’s crucial role; it amplifies it in the same way a carpenters’ work was amplified by the invention of the nail gun. Just as educators have always been responsible for the quality and integrity of their classrooms, they must now extend that vigilance to AI. This active supervision ensures that AI enhances, rather than supplants, sound pedagogical practices.

Innovation has built all of its AI integrations around a clear philosophy: the instructor remains the expert in the loop. When AI generates test questions, they must be approved by the instructor before being added to an assessment. When AI scores an essay, the instructor sets the rubric, defines the guidelines, and reviews the results before incorporating any of them into the student’s grade. When AI participates in student discussions, it does so within parameters the instructor has defined — including tone, context, and purpose — and under active supervision. When AI grades short-answer responses, it relies on model answers the instructor has already selected and endorsed.

At every turn, Innovation’s workflow puts the instructor in the role of guide and gatekeeper — promoting good old-fashioned professional oversight through the design itself.

The profs who failed to properly read and edit the course materials or assessment comments are to be chided for editing poorly. But the expectation that students have that instructors be the author of all of their course materials is born of an age when technology makes this at least theoretically possible, although not practically so. The expectation that no assessment will be outside the hand of the instructor is a new fashion, also imagined in a context of hyper-alertness to AI usage. One professor noted in the article was criticized by the student for chatting with the AI about writing the critique of the student’s work. But this is precisely what a professor might do with a live assistant in days gone by! The difference is that the student of the past would have no knowledge of the discussion.

One of my remote students this year had nothing good to say about one of her teachers. She cited the example of the fact that her teacher got her powerPoint slide shows from ChatGPT. If that powerPoint were of poor quality or included incorrect information, I could agree. Where this student goes wrong is in thinking that the general notion of getting learning resources elsewhere is illegitimate or unprecedented. The wrong would be in presenting shoddy or incorrect information, not in failing to be the author of everything.

We are excited to be rolling out our massive upgrade to AI this month! Already, subscribers will notice the little purple buttons all over the site controls offering AI assistance with test question generation, grading student work, and tasks specifically geared toward teaching modern languages.

Subscribers will be invited to agree to the new terms of service when everything is up and running in June. Here is the text of that change:

AI-ENABLED FEATURES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Innovation Assessments LLC now provides access to a variety of artificial intelligence (AI)–powered tools to enhance educational services. These may include, but are not limited to, automated test question generation, grading support for essays and short answers, rubric design assistance, writing prompt creation, and supervised chat-based discussion with AI for students. Users should be aware that AI-generated content may contain inaccuracies or reflect inherent biases, and human oversight is crucial.

Use of AI services is subject to the following terms:

• Students may only access AI-powered chat or discussion tools under licensing of their teacher, and only if the teacher has enabled this feature for their activity.
• All AI-generated content is provided “as-is” and may require human review. Teachers are responsible for reviewing all materials prior to use in assessments or instruction.
• Essay grading by AI is advisory in nature. Final evaluation remains at the discretion of the teacher or institution.
• Teachers and students may not use the platform’s AI features to submit or generate content that is harmful, discriminatory, or in violation of academic integrity policies (which include, but are not limited to, plagiarism and unauthorized assistance).
• Innovation Assessments LLC reserves the right to monitor, restrict, or disable AI usage in cases of misuse, abuse, or usage patterns that negatively impact the platform’s performance or other users.

Innovation Assessments LLC will handle data generated through AI features in accordance with its Privacy Policy. Innovation Assessments LLC may update or modify its AI-powered features and functionalities over time. By using any AI-related features, you acknowledge the limitations of current AI technology and agree not to rely solely on AI-generated outputs for high-stakes educational decisions.

AI TOKEN USAGE

Access to AI features is governed by a monthly token system. Each account tier includes a set number of AI tokens per month, which may be used for supported features such as question generation, AI chat, grading support, and other automated tools. Tokens renew every 30 days from the date of paid subscription.

• AI tokens do not roll over. Unused tokens expire at the end of each 30-day cycle.
• Users may purchase additional token bundles if their monthly allotment is exhausted before renewal.
• Token usage is calculated by the AI company and may vary based on the feature and the amount of text processed in both the request and the response. Requests with more text will consume more tokens, as will more detailed or lengthy AI-generated content. Higher-cost actions (e.g., full essay scoring) consume more tokens.
• Token balances and consumption details are available to account administrators within the platform dashboard.
• It is the user’s responsibility to monitor token use and purchase additional tokens as needed.

Innovation Assessments LLC reserves the right to modify token costs, tier allowances, or features covered by tokens with notice. Abuse of the token system may result in service restrictions or termination.