The next issue of my newsletter, Digital Education, will be a short one focused on robots and AI. (I'm still writing the one concerned with the question, "Is educational research worth the paper it's written on?")

I think a lot of nonsense has been written about AI, about how a 'bot' will take over the teaching, differentiation and assessment functions. I suppose that could be the case, but where I think the potential lies is in taking away the drudgery, leaving the teacher to be discerning and creative. I'll give a couple of examples.

Many moons ago, there was a big deal made about Learning Management Systems. That is software that can test a pupil, in Mathematics, say, set them tasks at an appropriate level, generate a report, and test again and then set the next task, and so on. It was found that the best results were gained by putting puipils on the automated system for around 15 or 20 minutes. The software was good in saving the teacher a lot of time and grunt work, and generating reports that the teacher could use as the basis for being more creative and innovative.

Now, I realise that AI is much more intelligent than that software of the late 1990s, and maybe could ask the right questions and be creative. But a good teacher will pick up a fleeting expression on a pupil's face when she says "Oh I get it" when what she really means is "I'd better say that I understand because otherwise my classmates will think I'm stupid and the teacher will lose patience with me." When there's a bot or a robot that can detect that, I may start to become concerned. However, call me an optimist, but I think we're some way off from that despite the strides made in developing apparently emotionally intelligent bots. That's why the article I wrote for Teach Secondary about AI was fairly upbeat (see Robots Aren’t Replacing Teachers, But The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence Could Make Our Lives Easier And Improve Education).

Another example of where a computer can do the hack work, leaving the teacher to focus on essentials, is when you use a spreadsheet for grading. I suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that you could set up a spreadsheet to generate randon grades for all your pupils -- See 6 ways to respond to requests for pointless data.

Yet there's a serious point there. If you use the 'rand between' function (sorry to get technical), you can have the spreadsheet generate randm grades between certain numbers or letters, such as between 1 and 7 or between A and G. Because of the law of averages, there's a pretty good chance that most of the randomly-generated grades would turn out to be the ones you'd have assigned to the pupils anyway. That means that you could quickly go through the list of names and grades, and alter the ones that are quite obviously wrong.

If this smacks of too much reliance on chance, here's a more sensible version of the same thing, minus the random element. Use a look-up table to say what grades or levels pupils have attained or are likely to attain, given their marks in an exam.

The alternative would be to go through the same process yourself, looking at each pupil's mark, and then reading a table to see what grade that equates to. That takes ages (I know, I've done it), while a spreadsheet takes no time at all. It's daft not to use it in my opinion.

You could go further. If you then use conditional formatting to highlight the ones that are very high and those which are very low, the highlights will enable you to very quickly focus on the 'outliers' and explore further if needs be.

In each of these scenarios the computer has been used to crunch through a load of data and highlighted the entries that seem to need further scrutiny. You would still need to look at all the data in each case, but the conputer would save you a lot of time.

If this all sounds like taking away the teacher's integrity, I don't see it like that. I'll give an example from the world of writing. There is software that can analyse sports results and then generate a news report from them. The number-crunching is brilliant; the reports I've read that have been generated automatically are as dull as ditchwater.  A mention of the weather, for example, would probably say:

"It was minus 5 degrees Celcius, and the wind chill factor made it feel like minus 10."

You would be very unlikely to get the sort of line used by Hugh McIlvanney:

“It was the kind of wind that seemed to peel the flesh off your bones and come back for the marrow.”

(Quoted in Hugh McIlvanney remains the matchless Master, by Norman Giller.)

Nevertheless, the writing software could be used to generate a lot of the sentences from the data, leaving the writer more time to do the creative stuff. To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced myself, but I'd love to try something like this. I'm still waiting for someone to invent a computer program featured in the 1960s series The Avengers. In one episode, it showed romance novels being churned out automatically by playing the piano! The soft passages were translated into slushy passages in the book, while the dramatic bits were interpreted as the hero's obstacles and cliffhangers. Sounds logical to me, and a lot easier than sitting down staring at a blank sheet of paper!

Anyway, more of AI etc in my newsletter, Digital Education, which you can sign up for here: Newsletter. It's free, it's been going for 17 years, and you won't get spammed -- so what are you waiting for?