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Reviewing TeachmateAI

TeachmateAI claims the market share for teacher tools, but what does it offer for ITT?

Victoria Hedlund, 15th November 2024

The GenAI teacher tool landscape is pretty well established now, with many companies offering very shiny tools claiming to reduce teacher workload. So what do you get for free, how can we work with these free tools and what do they have to offer teachers and trainee teachers? This series reviews several existing tools, exploring what they produce for an imaginary teacher, wanting to teach friction to year 4. Here we focus on TeachmateAI and conclude: Free, basic, shallow, introductory.

TeachmateAI is a tool that offer a free (restricted) account and several paid options. you can find it here: https://teachmateai.com/

Here, we create an imaginary teacher, wanting help with their practice, and who has the following user inputs: subject: science, year: 4, topic: friction, objective: to understand factors affecting friction.

The free account gives you access to a few tools, as shown in the screenshot. Some of these are aimed at school leadership (for example, the SIP writer). Here we focus on the free teacher tools only. Some of these tools would be more useful for other subjects, for example the reading book recommendations and mini saga. These don't lend themselves well to the friction lesson our teacher wants help with, so we won't be focusing on them here.

Let's explore these tools:

Activity ideas generator
Concept explainer
Jingle generator

A nice aspect of these tools is the option to refine results. This is common on other tools and seems to be turning into the industry standard. However, we will explore what the limitations currently are with this functionality, in contrast to using a GenAI instead of the TeachmateAI tool.

If you'd prefer to skip ahead to our summary, scroll down.

Free tools included in the TeachmateAI basic subscription (as of 14th Nov '24)..

Activity Ideas Generator

One of the options to 'refine my answer' was to 'differentiate'. Once we had recovered from shock of the use of the 'dirty word' of ITT, we couldn't help but click on it and see what was produced. Compare the two below. Perhaps the educational use of the word 'differentiation' (which has varied somewhat over the last 20 years) hasn't been used by the model, and a more generalised definition of the word has been applied instead?

The vanilla response to the user inputs creates...

It gives ten ideas for activities, as you can see in the documents. The ideas are arguably quite 'large and diverse' ideas, probably in-keeping with the title 'creative activities'. There's not a huge amount of detail, but its a good place to start if you need ideas. Maybe teachers may be left thinking 'how exactly do I execute this idea?'.

The 'Differentiation' version (now wash your mouth out!)

The 'differentiation' aspect seems to be a bolt-on to the original ideas. Despite being labelled as 'differentiation' these bolt-ons are in fact nothing to do with SEND; they are pre-planned modifications to the activity. This is somewhat in contradiction to ITTECF 5.4: 'Adaptive teaching is less likely to be valuable if it causes the teacher to artificially create distinct tasks for different groups of pupils or to set lower expectations for particular pupils. '

Really, these are more alike to prompts for teachers to remember to scaffold. We would have liked to have seen more to hit ITTECF 5.8: High quality teaching for all pupils, including those with SEND, is based on strategies which are often already practised by teachers, and which can be developed through training and support.

Concept Explainer

It produced a three page explainer. Being scientists, we are sad to see it hasn't actually pulled on any of the wealth of information that is out there, for example the Institute of Physics 'IOP Spark' Platform (which we REALLY hope gets integrated with GenAI very soon, hint-hint nudge-nudge!) or anything from the Association for Science Education and their database. Another criticism is that it's written with a severe lack of technical vocab, or showing any link with prior and sequential ideas on forces. It's no match for the great plans that Plan Assess have created without the use of GenAI. On the plus side, it's a start if a teacher has no experience or existing perception?

When prompted for refining the answer, we just HAD to click on the 'add in some common misconceptions' option. The second document below contains the amendments. Again, it's a start for teacher to remember to consider misconceptions, but it's missed an opportunity to signpost readers to the sources of information, where they can deepen their subject knowledge.

What it creates, a la vanilla style...

Basic and non-technical but essentially its a start to thinking about the subject knowledge.

Refined with 'add in some common misconceptions'

With added misconceptions. We'd like to have seen links for teachers to deepen their subject knowledge here.

Jingle Maker

We are all for the arts and science combined. But perhaps a somewhat underwhelming jingle on friction....from TeachMateAI here?!

So, we asked Copilot to make a jingle on friction, for comparative purposes. Indulge yourself with its response!

Summary

Lets face it, this is good for free. It's an introduction. Somewhat missing the opportunity to link to subject specific services and platforms for development of subject knowledge. The functionality is somewhat clunky - it ignores many requests typed into the 'refine my answer' box without indicating that it can't help you. Definitely not hitting the adaptive teaching mark or ITTECF criteria.

Let's pull out the pros and the cons:

Pro's:

These tools were free
Gets teachers thinking about misconceptions and scaffolding their materials
Fun little jingles

Cons:

Depth of subject knowledge and misconceptions is missing.
No links to subject-specific information sources or platforms for teachers to improve the depth of their subject knowledge or subject pedagogy
The concept of differentiation is contestable and not aligned to the ITTECF.
No integration of SEND awareness, and not useful for adaptive teaching.
Ignores 'refine my answer' requests.

So, in summary let's say: Free, basic, shallow, introductory.

If anyone has paid for the full version and would like to add to this, please contact us!

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