Like many students, Nicole Acevedo has come to rely on artificial intelligence.

The 15-year-old recently used it to help write her speech for her quinciñera. When she waits too long on completing homework, Nicole admitted, she leans on the technology so she can hand assignments in on time. This may change with the introduction of an AI tool coaching students to be better writers.

Her school, located in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, has also embraced artificial intelligence. But it is hoping to harness it in ways that supplement learning rather than supplant it.

This past school year, Nicole’s freshman seminar class at Northside Charter High School incorporated an AI writing tool created by the school’s tech-forward chief academic officer, Rahul Patel. The Center for Professional Education of Teachers, based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, acted as an adviser on the project.

Called Connectink, the tool acts like an on-demand writing coach, providing students with such support as sentence starters when they get stuck, or prompts to encourage them to stretch their work using dialogue, descriptions, or rhetorical questions. It seeks to provide immediate feedback for students since educators can only provide so much attention to individual students in a given period.

As New York City, as well as the federal government, promise to incorporate more AI tools into classrooms, concerns abound, not only related to students using the technology to cheat on assignments but also about possible racial bias in AI teacher tools. Recent findings revealed bias in tools designed to support classroom planning, lesson differentiation, and administrative tasks.

Patel is hopeful that this AI tool coaching students might offer some early lessons on how to approach AI’s educational potential thoughtfully.

The Center for Professional Education of Teachers researched a pilot of the tool with about 360 students at three high schools in the last six weeks of the school year. The tool was used to help students write personal narratives as a way to build confidence in developing their own voice as well as use their writing as a way to build empathy and connect with others.

Read the full article about Connectink by Amy Zimmer at Chalkbeat.