No Stress, Lemon Zest: Using School AI
- GISD Digital Learning
- Apr 4
- 3 min read
by Todd Stansbury, Jackson MST
Helping students improve their writing skills can often feel like a thankless task. It involves giving meaningful feedback in a timely manner, then expecting the students to take advantage of that feedback and use it to improve their next draft. Multiply that by a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty students and suddenly what seemed like a time consuming but conquerable task can suddenly seem overwhelming. But as Robin liked to say in Young Justice, “Stay whelmed.” There’s a School AI tool for that.
School AI is a GPT powered AI site that offers a variety of tools to help students learn and teachers teach. There could be a dozen posts on School AI’s tools and how they can be used in the classroom and you’d barely scratch the surface. For today, let’s just focus on one of the “Assistants” that School AI offers, the Essay Grading Assistant.
1. Log on to School AI using your Google sign on.
2. Navigate to the “Assistants” tab.
3. Click on the “Essay Grading Assistant.”
Just like the title suggests, the Essay Grading Assistant can help you grade essays you’ve assigned for your students. Simply provide the rubric and then copy and paste the essay or batch load it as PDFs. That can be a true timesaver when you’re ready to grade those essays, but what about the original problem we were talking about? Providing the students with feedback and helping them improve their writing?
To help the students out, School AI offers a new essay grading feature (and yes, it’s a free feature). Once you have created a rubric and activated a session, School AI will provide you with a student feedback link. You give the students the feedback link and students are able to check their own work and receive feedback on it. Some students thrive on this, seeing the feedback as a challenge that they’re determined to beat. One of my students systematically went through each piece of feedback, following the suggestions trying to get that ever elusive perfect score.
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And that’s a pretty important note. The feedback link you give the students is not generative AI. It will not write the essay for them, or offer suggestions on what to write. It only provides information about how the writing sample matches the rubric it’s been given.
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Obviously, not all results will be the same. Some students get more than a little frustrated because they worked hard on their writing sample and an algorithm tells them it needs work. Others, like the student I mentioned, love it because they’ve always wanted feedback to help them improve.
Even when you use School AI to grade the essays, you should double check the scores and make your own opinions. AI is a lot of things, but failable is not one of them. Like any tool, it depends on the user. But using this tool can help your students understand how their writing is evaluated and give them an opportunity to make adjustments to make it better. Give it a try for yourself and let me know in the comments how it works for you.
If this wasn’t easy enough, no stress, lemon zest: check out this step-by-step click sheet to see how I did it.