Schools are still learning how to harness artificial intelligence to help students with disabilities.
Schools are grappling with how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help students with visual, speech, language, and hearing impairments with tasks that come easily to others.
In the US, getting the latest technology into the hands of students with disabilities is a priority for the education department, which has told schools they must consider whether students need tools like text-to-speech and alternative communication devices.
There is concern about how to ensure students using it – including those with disabilities – are still learning.
AI can be used to summarise thoughts into an outline, break down complex passages or even translate Shakespeare into English.
Computer-generated voices can also help visually impaired or dyslexic students with reading.
Plugging a problem into AI
Ben Snyder, a 14-year-old student from Larchmont, New York, who was recently diagnosed with a learning disability, has been increasingly using AI to help with homework.
“Sometimes in math, my teachers will explain a problem to me, but it just makes absolutely no sense,” he said.
“So if I plug that problem into AI, it’ll give me multiple different ways of explaining how to do that”.
He likes a program called Question AI. Earlier in the day, he asked the program to help him write an outline for a book report – a task he completed in 15 minutes that otherwise would have taken him an hour and a half because of his struggles with writing and organization. But he does think using AI to write the whole report crosses a line.
“That’s just cheating,” Ben said.
Schools have been trying to balance the technology’s benefits against the risk that it will do too much to make sure that students are still improving their skills.
Some say, however, that AI technology can level the playing field.
“There are definitely going to be people who use some of these tools in nefarious ways. That’s always going to happen,” said Paul Sanft, director of a Minnesota-based centre where families can try out different assistive technology tools and borrow devices.
“But I don’t think that’s the biggest concern with people with disabilities, who are just trying to do something that they couldn’t do before”.
