AI in Education Tool Review: Curriculum Genie

This month, we're diving into Curriculum Genie, an AI-powered tool designed to support educators in the demanding task of curriculum and lesson planning. Developed by Learning Genie, this agentic AI aims to revolutionize how teachers create instructional materials.

What is Curriculum Genie?

Curriculum Genie is an AI agent that assists teachers in generating high-quality unit plans, lesson plans, and other instructional resources. It goes beyond simple content generation by focusing on alignment with state standards, incorporating diverse learning strategies, and even enabling student-teacher co-creation of learning paths. It's designed to streamline the planning process, allowing educators to focus more on student engagement and personalized support.

Benefits of Using Curriculum Genie

Time-Saving and Efficiency: For many teachers, curriculum, and lesson planning are incredibly time-consuming. Curriculum Genie significantly reduces this workload by rapidly generating detailed units, lesson plans, and assessments. This frees up valuable time that can be redirected to direct student interaction and professional development.

Standards Alignment: A headache for educators is ensuring their lessons align with state and district standards. Curriculum Genie boasts integration with numerous state learning standards, automatically aligning generated content to help ensure compliance without manual effort.

Personalization and Inclusivity: This tool stands out in its ability to support differentiated instruction. It can tailor curriculum content to meet the unique needs of individual students, including those with IEPs/IFSPs and English Language Learners. Incorporating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and culturally responsive practices helps create more equitable and inclusive learning environments.

Enhanced Instructional Quality: Curriculum Genie doesn't just produce content; it aims to craft lessons with instructional intent. It can suggest activities, questioning techniques, and strategies to meet learning objectives and even integrate interdisciplinary subject matter (like STEM/STEAM) and thematic units. You can also have it purposefully include your school’s Portrait of a Graduate in your units.

Student-Teacher Co-Creation: A particularly innovative feature is its support for student involvement in curriculum design. This fosters student agency and ownership over their learning, leading to more engaging and relevant educational experiences by allowing students to contribute to their own learning journey.

Formative Assessment Integration: The tool can automatically generate formative assessments and provide immediate feedback tools, helping teachers quickly gauge student understanding and adapt their instruction in real time. This also allows for insights into student performance data to refine teaching strategies.

Potential Drawbacks of Curriculum Genie

Initial Learning Curve: While designed to be intuitive, mastering the prompts and features to get the most out of Curriculum Genie will require purposeful creation of your prompts and feedback.

"Garbage In, Garbage Out": Like any AI tool, the quality of the output heavily depends on the quality and specificity of the input prompts. Teachers will need to develop strong prompting skills to generate truly useful and relevant curriculum materials.

Need for Human Oversight and Refinement: While Curriculum Genie can generate content, it's crucial for educators to review, refine, and adapt the materials to their specific classroom context, student needs, and teaching style. It's a powerful assistant, not a replacement for pedagogical expertise.

Cost: All new users receive four free units, and you can earn additional free units by sharing with a friend.

Curriculum Genie appears to be a robust and promising tool for educators aiming to optimize their planning processes, enhance instructional quality, and foster more personalized and inclusive learning environments. Its focus on standards alignment and student agency makes it a compelling option in the evolving landscape of AI in education.

Two new AI Activity Cards

We want to start by thanking you all for the overwhelmingly positive feedback on the Edutopia Article. The goal of Creating Learners is to help all learners find their purpose through meaningful educational experiences. We hope the AI Activity Cards help you do this for your students.

AI activity cards were designed to encourage teachers to think about how to utilize AI with their students. They include a description of the activity, a sample prompt to put into an AI tool, and some reflection questions. -They are not complete lesson plans. -They assume students have been instructed on the strengths and weaknesses of AI.

1. What’s My Superpower
   This activity is great for early in the school year to let you learn more about your students. In a personalized learning environment, students have agency and self-efficacy. Our job as teachers is to help them build those two vital skills. This activity helps you and your students identify where they feel invincible and what they perceive as their current kryptonite.

2. Co-created Classroom Norms
   Kick off the school year by collaborating with students to define class values and norms. Use AI to summarize their input and create a shared visual representation of your classroom culture.

3. See all 22 Activity Cards

We hope you found this issue of our monthly newsletter useful. We would appreciate your feedback.

If your organization is looking for back-to-school PD related to these topics, we still have two open dates. We would love to work with you.

You can reach us at [email protected]