Ways To Utilize Chatbots In Education
Technology has had an impact on all industries, to at least some extent.
Some industries, it’s hand is felt more strongly than others, of course, but the continued adoption of technology for industry is inevitable and exciting. One industry with a slightly strange relationship to technology is education. Technology isn’t as inherently suited to education as it is to, say, medicine, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for it to have an enormous impact. It just requires some more creativity. Education has lots of traditional elements that don’t necessarily gel as cleanly with technology. One surprising recent contender for inclusion in education and learning is the chatbot, a form of automated response technology that is most commonly used in customer service roles. It won’t necessarily be obvious how they could play a part in education, so let’s take a look at the ways that you could use chatbots in education.
A Technological Education
Technology moves extremely fast, there’s no denying that fact. One minute you think you’ve understood the status quo, the next you’re miles behind and everyone understands gadgets and systems that you had no previous idea about. “Teaching technology is hard and, disregarding things like computer science degrees, it’s hardly ever done on a simple level. Integrating elements of tech, like chatbots, into the classroom allows for an organic, inherent level of technological education to occur for children for whom technology is going to become more and more vital”, explains Sasha Chavez, educator at PaperFellows and AustralianHelp . Maintaining the active engagement with advanced tech for the next generation will be vital for preparing them for what is to come.
Instant Assistance All Of The Time
Teachers are great. They are a sector of industry that deserve all of the respect and attention that we can possibly offer, since their work is so, so vital. Though turning to robots to complete tasks in education could be read as underappreciating the value of teachers, it is, in fact, the opposite of that. Teachers have it tough and with class sizes rising, it can be overwhelming to be attending to the needs of 30, even 40 students at the same time. Chatbots can serve a purpose as a teacher’s assistant. There are so many menial questions that kids ask their teacher which take up the teacher’s time but don’t help the education of the students. A chatbot is always there, ready to answer these simpler, more binary questions right away, saving time and resources. ‘Which worksheet do I do first? Or ‘Which colored pencil goes with which exercise.’ These are the sorts of problems that can weigh a teacher down but would be swept aside in an instant through the presence of chat bots.
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Bring Up Student Engagement
Another area in which teachers are waging a long and difficult war, is student attention. “The very essence of things like social media, streaming, instant messaging and all the other bells and whistles of modern high-speed internet, is immediate gratification. Teachers are trying to get students with record-low attention spans to engage with difficult and, sometimes, dry material. Introducing some of those tech elements to the content can help to engage students in a way which is reminiscent of how the internet engages them, promoting a higher level of engagement with academic materials”, proposes Mark Law, chatbot programmer at BoomEssays and Assignment Writer . Chatbots feel alive in that immediate sense that has become so important to this coming generation. There’s a desire to feel like interactions are live and that there is potential at any moment for further exploration. Engaging students like this will help them to focus more efficiently and to never feel like their attention is pushing on beyond the content that they are being present. There would be few teachers who want attest to the difficulty of achieving this sort of stimulation.
Conclusion
Overall, chatbots have a lot of potential. As with any technological advancement, particularly when it directly affects young kids, care needs to be taken over the implementation and a lot can be said for extra caution being taken. But, if all goes well, there is a bright future to look forward to.
Aimee Laurence has worked in tech journalism and marketing for the past 3 years at Write My Essay UKWritings. She works mainly on future tech and making technology consumer-ready. She also works as a freelance editor at the EssayRoo Review.
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Originally published at https://blog.engati.com on November 21, 2019.
