Of late, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, even in education. It’s been a part of our learning journey for some time, but it caught our attention around the end of 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November of that year. Since then, from 2023 onwards, more AI tools have popped up, and people are amazed at what these tools can do.
Now, let’s talk about how you can make the most of this cool technology in your course of study. We’ll share some tips on using AI to make your learning better without taking shortcuts or cheating. These tips aren’t just for college students; they can help high school students, too. You can use them for exam help as well as writing essays and solving math problems.
What is artificial intelligence?
To put it simply, artificial intelligence, or AI, is the programmed ability of computers to perform tasks that require human or near-human intelligence. AI tools can learn, reason, solve problems, perceive, understand language, and even make decisions. AI systems are designed to analyze and interpret data, adapt to changing conditions, and improve their performance over time without explicit programming.
Some of the examples of AI tools that I am sure you are familiar with are voice assistants, self-driving cars, and chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google Bard, et cetera.
Since their massive release in 2023, chatbots have been particularly popular and impactful on education. They have become so helpful to students that there is one trending video on TikTok of a graduate who hilariously said the first person he was thanking for achieving his goal was ChatGPT.
Although he was merely joking, we can’t help but sense a lick of truth in his confession. AI has been very helpful, and not to forget, destructive, to how we learn, access, and consume information.
AI can be helpful in the following ways:
1. Use AI to make complex text easier to understand.
Every student knows that there are two things you aim at when reading:
i. Understanding the text
The primary objective is to grasp what the text is conveying. You need to comprehend the main ideas, concepts, and details presented in the material. If you can’t understand the text, it becomes challenging to move on to the second goal.
ii. Retaining information
This means not just reading to understand momentarily but absorbing the content in a way that allows you to recall it later, especially during exams.
Understanding is the foundation for effective retention; if the material is unclear initially, it becomes difficult to remember and apply it later. If it is hard for you to understand what the text is trying to communicate, it is inevitable that you won’t retain the information. Or if, by any chance, you manage to cram the information, you won’t be able to do so for a very long.
This is where many AI tools come in handy. For this particular use, I will suggest you use Read Easy.ai. Read Easy.ai is a tool that uses AI to make text easier to understand. What is more, this tool works with different languages and can be used with various devices and apps. It can even give suggestions to writers on how to make their writing easier to read. Read Easy.ai is part of two groups, Accessibility Desk and Digitaal Toegankelijk, which work to make digital content accessible for everyone.
You can find Read Easy.ai here: https://readeasy.ai/
Disclaimer: I was not paid to promote Read Easy.ai but I’m just trying to make it easier for you.
2. Extracting questions from the text.
Another puzzle you have to solve when you are studying is to predict what will possibly come in the exams or how a question can be asked in a particular passage.
Some students read and somewhat understand the text, but they still can’t see how a question could be set from the text or in what way it could be set.
AI can be very helpful in solving this puzzle. There are many AI tools that you can use to achieve this. One of them is the popular ChatGPT itself. The way you can do this is to copy a portion of the text that you want to formulate questions from and paste it into the ChatGPT search bar. Then write a prompt asking ChatGPT to formulate questions from the passage you pasted on the search bar.
The prompt could be something like this: “Formulate examinable questions from the above passage.” It could be anything. As long as it asks the chatbot to formulate questions.
Another tool you can use to achieve the same result, especially when the text involved is large, like a whole PDF or something of that sort, is AskYourPDF. This AI tool converts the whole PDF into an interactive conversation. You can ask questions, and the AI answers the questions exclusively from the content of the PDF.
What I like the most about this AI tool is that you can never worry about getting the wrong or irrelevant information. Everything is coming from the PDF or similar resource you have fed into it. So, you can use this tool for exam help.
Hypotenuse AI is also another good tool that you can use in your study. It works the same as AskYourPDF, but there is something unique it brings to the table. You can use Hypotenuse AI to answer questions within the PDF you have uploaded.
Instead of uploading the PDF and asking for questions from it, Hypotenuse AI answers the questions already in the PDF and to whom you might not have answers.
3. Use it to get links to websites with the content you are looking for.
The most frustrating experience you can run into in your course of study as a student is the unsuccessful search for resources on the internet. You have been given an assignment, for instance, and the deadline is just around the corner. Your professor has set the assignment in such a way that you can’t seem to find any resources online that contain the information you are looking for.
AI can help greatly with just that. Bing.ai, by Microsoft, powered by OpenAI and containing free ChatGPT-4, and the newly released Copilot are very efficient in doing this.
Type the question you want an answer to and Bing.ai will generate some responses. At the end of the response, there are always links from which it pulls the answers it generates. Click on those links and find the resource you are looking for.
Another way it can be helpful is when you have been given a diagram to label or describe, but you haven’t a clue what the diagram is or what its parts are. Bing.ai can do that quickly.
When in the chatbot, you can simply click the camera icon and upload the picture you want to label or describe. Write a simple prompt such as “describe the diagram provided” or “label the parts of the diagram provided” and leave the rest to the AI.
Usually, Bing will generate an answer, and at the end, it will give links to images that look similar to the diagram you have uploaded. The best thing to do is to click on the image you think is the same as the image you have uploaded to the chatbots. This will lead you to the web page where you will find the rest of the information.
This is important because chatbots like Bing.ai and ChatGPT can occasionally generate incorrect information. So, you must click the links and access the actual web page with the information you are looking for.
4. Save time with AI
This kind of sums up everything we have discussed so far. Time is a significant factor in learning. It is what most of us struggle with. Sometimes the material may be easy, but we are simply spending time on the wrong thing. AI can be a super timesaver. Using AI requires a bit of being smart. That is why one can achieve what another can’t with the same AI tools at their disposal.
There are multiple ways to use AI to save time while studying.
- Plan Your Study Time Easily:
Try using AI tools that plan your study schedule based on when you work best. Apps like Google Calendar or smart scheduling apps can make planning study sessions easier.
- Smarter Note-Taking
Use apps that use AI to turn spoken or written words into organized notes. Apps like Otter.ai or Microsoft OneNote help you keep your study materials in order. They can also help you access your notes from any device anywhere as long as you log in with the same credentials you created your accounts with.
- Easy Flashcards
Use AI-made flashcards or apps like Anki, Quizlet, or Cram. They help you remember things better with smart repetition.
- Hands-Free Help with Voice Commands
Askice-activated assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa for quick info or help managing your study time. They can also pull out information from the web really quickly without having to type or open a web browser.
- Summarize Texts Quickly
Use tools that use AI to shorten long articles or books into brief summaries. Apps like SummarizeBot or online tools like SMMRY can help.
5. Improve grammar and coherence
Submitting an essay that is full of grammatical errors and incoherents can set you up for a catastrophic failure, even though you may have gotten the content right. You can use AI to save yourself from all that.
One well-known AI writing tool is Grammarly. This tool checks your writing as you type and suggests improvements for things like grammar and punctuation. You can install it on your device, and that is it. It will help you write better.
Another helpful tool is ProWritingAid, which looks at your writing in detail and gives you reports on how to make it better.
Hemingway Editor is a special tool that focuses on making your writing clear and easy to understand. Microsoft Word also has a feature called Editor that helps with grammar and writing style. Google Docs can find and fix mistakes too.
Some tools can even read your writing out loud to you. This can help you find sentences that sound strange or are hard to understand. Style guide tools, like StyleWriter, make sure your writing follows specific rules.
6. Personalized learning
Students do not learn the same way. Different students have different approaches to learning, and their approaches determine how they retain information.
Although the idea that “students have different styles of learning” does not have a shred of scientific evidence, we can agree that the influence of culture and environment has made different people learn differently.
Some students learn better when they listen to others than when they read themselves. If you are such a student, you can, for example, feed the text from your PDF to an AI tool like ElevenLabs, NaturalReader, and many others of their kind to convert the text into audio. Then you can listen to the audio over and over again until you internalize the content of the material.
There are similar AI tools for visual learners, too, and so on. It is important to understand what type of learner you may be and quickly find an AI that will help you with that.
To sum it up, AI is here to stay, and it will influence education and learning. High school and college students must take advantage of these tools and use them in ways that will optimize their learning without necessarily cheating or compromising on quality.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Is AI dangerous for education?
This question reminds me of a debate we conducted this year. The motion of the debate was “AI is a clear and present danger to education.” Luckily, I was opposing the motion.
I honestly do not think that, in its present form, AI is dangerous for education. I can’t say it is far from the truth but it is simply not true. AI has done a greater good to education so far. It has helped in solving routine task, which has given students and educators time to focus on things that are really important and novel. AI is not a danger to education, at least for not. But if not used ethically, it can, no doubt, present danger.
Is AI bad for humans and society?
The answer is sort of the same as the above. What really is dangerous to society is how AI is used. Presently, AI is merely a tool we can use, just like any other tool. This means that it can only be dangerous if, and when, we misuse it.
