A powerful tool to fight burnout. Swiftly create lesson plans. Goes great with sound pedagogy.
Community Review for Magicschool.ai
My Take
Overall, I highly recommend Magicschool to educators of all grade levels and subject areas. The app has boundless horizons for automation of administrative tasks, can assist in lesson planning, and help teachers craft the resources that otherwise take time and energy to create that could be spent on assessing students and meeting their needs.
Perhaps the app can look more into providing resources for its lesson plans and activity generators. While it is important for educators to locate and vet their own resources, other competitors such as Diffit list the sources of their information which can lead to in-class usage as necessary. If this is possible, surely auto-generate hyperlinks to videos such as the one I mentioned earlier in my lesson plan can be implemented.
How I Use It
This application is incredibly powerful with a seemingly endless amount of functions from email to assessment creation. However, I specifically utilized this application to create a multiple choice exam and a unit on Brown v. Board of Education for high school social studies classes.
Magicschool appears to be powerful with regard to quick assessment creation. Drawing on knowledge from up to 2021, I simply fed the program the following prompt to create a multiple choice quiz: "Tenth Grade social studies assessment on President Nixon's Watergate Scandal." The application fired back a short quiz complete with an answer key, featuring questions such as "What year did the Watergate Scandal take place?" and "Who did Nixon fire in the Saturday Night Massacre?" While this is incredibly useful in its own right, social studies classes cannot be relied upon for basic recall quizzes at the high school level. For elementary and middle school students, Magicschool is certainly powerful for quick assessment creation.
However, in the sphere of planning, Magicschool packs a punch! I fed the application the following NJSLS: "6.1.12.CivicsDP.13.a: Analyze the effectiveness of national legislation, policies, and Supreme Court decisions in promoting civil liberties and equal opportunities (i.e., the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title VII, Title IX, Affirmative Action, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade)." I also gave the application context as it suggested: "Students must show understanding of the events and outcomes going into and following Brown v. Board of Ed. Students must relate the event to previous events in United States history including Plessy v. Ferguson and other events like Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the Little Rock Nine, etc. Students must analyze the rulings of this event and draw conclusions on its decision to make implications for future Civil Rights events and relate it to the present day. Students will be assessed on the unit at its conclusion with heterogeneous group presentations."
The application did not fail to impress me. Not only did it list on its own accord an additional NJSLS alignment (6.1.12.CivicsDP.13.b), it also gave me creative ideas to incorporate further assignments and activities to this rather 'raw' idea of a lesson plan I fed it. It gave me anticipatory sets like, "Why do you think that Supreme Court decisions are crucial?" and even suggested I show a video, though it did not link to me a specific, existent resource. This lesson plan is not "plug-and-play" but is certainly "cake-mix" if creating a lesson plan is anything like baking. While it ignored my prompt of group presentations, it provided guided practice group activities like "case studies for students to analyze" and even gave me scaffolding questions to hurl at my students and extension/enrichment activities! In short, lesson planning may not be completely taken over by Magicschool, but it will certainly get the wheels turning and help keep lessons fresh!