Mindy and Gina are back with our final championship round of AI Madness. In this episode, Mindy and Gina take a deep dive into Brisk Teaching and School AI. Join them as they put these two AI tools against each other in completing similar tasks and reveal the good, the bad, and the truly amazing about both of these tools. Curious to know which tool wins? Take a listen to find out!

Brisk Teaching

• Plans - Free for teachers. Paid version with additional features/tools for schools.
• Become a Certified Brisk AI Professional
  • 20-minute course for 45 days of premium Brisk feature

School AI

• Free for teachers. School Plan available - book a call to learn more.

In the spirit of March Madness and how much we love Iowa Women’s basketball on our team, we have taken the idea of bracket play into the AI world. In the last episode, we shared eight tools within the four categories of productivity and communication, lesson planning, scaffolding, and assessment and feedback. In this episode, we narrowed those eight tools down to four to face off in head-to-head competition.

• Ghostwrite
  • Cost: 15 emails a month, unlimited for $10/mo
  • Integrations: Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk
  • Student Use: Age restricted to 18 and up, but you could use as exemplar emails
  • No additional uses besides email generation.

• School AI
  • Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)
  • Integrations: download or copy the output
  • Student use: sidekick, bellringer, exit ticket, historic figure chatbot: spaces
    • Students do not need accounts.
  • Additional features: rubrics, text leveler, performance tasks, syllabus
    • Built-in chatbot assistants for teachers: field trip planner, co-teacher, curriculum coach

• Eduaide
  • Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts
  • Integrations: download or copy output
  • Student use: Age restricted to 18 and up
  • Additional features: Different categories for instructional use: planning, information objects, independent practice, cooperative learning, gamification, questions

• Brisk
  • Cost: Freemium or District Purchase
  • Integrations: works with Google docs, but integration into comments is for purchase
  • Student use: Students 13-18 can use Brisk teaching, however the educational institution has to reach out directly to Brisk to authorize the accounts.
  • Additional Features: Creates many different types of content on the fly (quizzes, decodable texts, lesson plans. Releveling on texts. Inspect writing by using the Replay tool in Brisk to see a time-lapse video of the writing being generated.

Join us next week for the AI Madness Final!

In the spirit of March Madness and how much we love Iowa Women’s basketball on our team, we have taken this idea of bracket play into the AI world and have come up with four different categories for AI tools. Within those four different categories, we have chosen two tools that we feel fall into that category to match against one another. To compare these two tools, we will share the cost, what integrations the tool has, and usability of the original output.

For the next two weeks, we will advance tools through the bracket and we will share more in-depth analysis of these tools.

Main Course: Elite Eight

Bracket 1: Productivity and Communication:

• Ghostwrite (Mindy)
  • Cost: 15 emails a month, unlimited for $10/mo
  • Integrations: Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk
  • Usability of Original Output: built into your email composer, choose tone, style, length, very little need to revise.
• Goblin Tools (Gina)
  • Cost: Free
  • Integrations: Download as a file, copy and paste
  • Usability of Original Output: Simplistic, choose tones to communicate, choose level of tone

Bracket 2: Lesson Planning

• School AI (Mindy)
  • Cost: teachers get a freemium account, otherwise purchase as a district (schedule a call)
  • Integrations: download or copy
  • Usability of Original Output: easy entry point for teachers getting started with AI, provides structures for completing a robust prompt, helps teachers get to a response that they want, sparks some ideas and provides a flow to a lesson
• Cuirpod (Gina)
  • Cost: freemium, $7.50/mo individual account, school license or district license $4000/yr
  • Integrations: NA (link sharing for adding students to a lesson)
  • Usability of Original Output: Many of the lessons that are generated are a good “starting point” however, a teacher would want to go through and add additional information and perhaps adjust some of the questions or interactions that Curipod automatically creates with AI.

Bracket 3: Scaffolding

• Eduaide (Gina)
  • Cost: Freemium: 15 generations/mo, limited feedback bot Pro account: $6/mo, school and districts accounts
  • Integrations: NA
  • Usability of Original Output: Good starting point for ideas, but doesn’t actually create differentiated artifacts.
• Diffit (Mindy)
  • Cost: Free up to 2500 words, $15/mo or district license
  • Integrations: Print or Download (with free version), paid Google integrations
  • Usability of Original Output: generates content, paste in text for easy leveling, grade leveling of text can be challenging to decipher–its really about student level so worth a professional eye.

Bracket 4: Assessment and Feedback

• Brisk (Mindy)
  • Cost: Freemium or District Purchase
  • Integrations: works with Google docs, but integration into comments is for purchase
  • Usability of Original Output:, generates feedback with the click of a button: glow and grow, rubric criteria and next steps
• Class Companion (Gina)
  • Cost: Freemium, free for teachers and students, paid school/district account integrates Class Companion into LMS (Schoology and Canvas, with additional features)
  • Integrations: LMS integration with school or district plan.
  • Usability of Original Output: Teachers have access to the content library on the free teacher plan. They cannot create a library of their own content. The AI is useful in coaching student and providing them just in time feedback and they are writing. It is transparent to all (students and teachers) they are getting feedback from AI and there is a place where students can dispute feedback they get from the AI. Geared towards an older audience so elementary teachers might not find this as useful.