Magic Up Your Lessons with MagicSchool AI and the BenQ Board

This is Teach Your Way with BenQ, where educators find ideas that work. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Teacher Way podcast with Teach Your Way with BenQ. Thank you for joining us today.

My name is Lauren and I'm the Customer Success Lead with Teach Your Way with BenQ. This episode. While it's great to listen to all the features we're gonna discuss today, this is a great one to have your board nearby so you can follow along today we are here at FETC and we're wrapping up the week. And we're ending here with Andrew from MagicSchool AI.

He's gonna show us some of the excellent features of how MagicSchool AI and the Teach Your Way with BenQ are a perfect pairing. Welcome, Andrew. Can you give us a little introduction and talk to us about MagicSchool AI? Absolutely.

So MagicSchool AI is the leading AI platform for teachers worldwide. Um, basically what we've done is we've taken all the large language models that you might be familiar with and we've packaged them for educators. So. We have a large array I can show you of tools that are designed for teachers to help you create content, um, enhance your instruction very quickly and save you time.

Uh, we also have a student side as well that we'll show you here in just a little bit that you can have your students interact with chatbots and, uh, deepen their learning and understanding as well. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much.

So one of the things with Teach Your Way with BenQ is we really want our teachers interacting with the boards, and we also want our students interacting with the boards. Will you show us one of the tools that a teacher can use to quickly create some content? Absolutely. So before I jump into that, I wanna show you, uh, because I know there's a lot of tools here, and it can be a little bit overwhelming, especially if you're jumping up to the Teach Your Way with BenQueue and you're like, Ooh, where do I start?

Uh, one thing that we have, it's a new feature, is called My Collections. So what you can do is before you start using this with students, is you can go in and create a collection of tools that you can quickly access. So I made a Teach Your Way with BenQ Tools collection. And so these are tools that I might quickly access here now on the Teach Your Way with BenQueue instead of having to filter through all those tools every single time.

So I just wanted to touch on that before I show you these other features. But if I wanted to jump in and start working with on something with students, I need to create a quick resource. I'm gonna go to Raina, our chat bot. Here I'm gonna show you how I can quickly create an activity that we could do right here on the Teach Your Way with BenQueue, and then I think you're gonna show how to actually interact with it.

So I'm gonna actually use the, uh, voice to text. So I'm gonna use the microphone that I believe is built in right down here conveniently, which is fantastic. Uh, and I'm going to ask Rena to create a resource for us to use in a math class. So I'm gonna use the, oh, let me go ahead and allow that.

There we go. Perfect. Okay, Reyna, will you please create five example blank coordinate grids for my students to mark specific points on? And will you also give the specific points you want students to mark?

Now we play the little waiting game. All right. Looks good. So Rena's gonna create those coordinate grids.

It can take a minute because it's rendering and creating images. There we go. So on the fly, a teacher could quickly create this whole group activity or this could become a station activity. So once those images are created, I'm gonna let you show what you can do with that.

So. Firstly, you were spot on. This is excellent being able to quickly talk to the board to grab that content. Um, and our microphones are down here on the front of the panel.

Um, they are voice enha enhancing microphones as well. So whether it's teachers or students coming up to the board when this might be a station activity, being able to quickly access those microphone. But also the fact that this created content so quickly and easily, it makes it so that teachers can pair this really easily with a resource that's already on the board. So I'm actually gonna scroll through and we'll look for, um, one of these coordinate grids that we can drop in to our whiteboard so I can come in here.

And I can actually use our floating assistant, our floating tool. It's the little pencil icon, um, that usually defaults to the lower left of the board. So when I tap on that floating tool, it's gonna give us some additional resources. So now I can use the pen, and this would be a great opportunity to model some resources here, but if I've already got some previous work, I can tap on the marker.

I can model for students what I want this to look like. And then when I'm ready for my students to come up, I can quickly grab a screenshot of this activity and I can now resize it quickly with my fingers. I can make sure to grab everything I need, and now I can send it directly into easy, right? And so now.

This lives in easy, right? I can also, um, copy and paste this, so if I have a previous activity here, I can come in here. I can now easily paste and move it around for different pages. This is especially helpful when I wanna have multiple versions.

So if I wanna have multiple students come up to the board, I'm not limited to one option, I can actually grab another one, and now I can have two students up here writing at the same time. Not only that, teachers can easily pop in here and duplicate pages. So now they have multiple versions. They don't have to go and recreate that content every time.

They can quickly just go from page to page, duplicate the work, and they can have different groups of students come up to the board. So I feel like those tools pair really well with the MagicSchool AI app. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's not just, you know, math, images, graphs.

You can do different, um, you can do different shapes, you can do all kinds of things with geometry, but you can also create any type of resource for like your language arts teachers as well. If you just wanted to create some quick sentences to do some quick, um, grammar work on the, on the board instantly based on your students' interest. You could have sentences created right away that are based on Minecraft, for example, and then you could have students come up to the board and make corrections to maybe some, um, improperly written sentences as well.

So all kinds of opportunities that you can create to throw up here on the board. So thank you so much for sharing such a quick way for teachers to create content to then use with their whole class, with their small groups, with individual students. So can you show us a tool that works great for our students to get up and and interact with MagicSchool AI? Absolutely.

So under Magic Student. There real quick, we have the ability to create what are called student rooms. So these are pre-created rooms where you get to choose which AI tools are dropped in to those rooms and which tools students can interact with. Now for me, um, one thing that I, I was a digital learning coach before joining MagicSchool AI, and one of the troubles that we ran into was, you know, a lot of my younger.

Uh, student teachers were, or not the teachers themselves, but the teachers who were teaching kindergarten, first grade are like, this isn't for us, right? Like, this is not designed for our kids. And to some extent it can be trickier for the younger students to, to interact with these two, especially kindergarten. However, with Teach Your Way with BenQ, it makes it really easy to do this as a whole group and have those same interactions, but more teacher led.

So I have a student room that we already created. So if I go to rooms, so we have this one here. FBTC, Teach Your Way with BenQ and so in this room I actually just dropped. So this is the teacher dashboard.

Um, the student view would look like this. We have this nice feature here called preview as student. So anytime you create a an activity for students to complete, you can click preview as student and it will actually open that experience as if you are the student makes it really easy to do a full group. So every time they jump into magic student, they're always met with this responsibility pact.

Still important to go over even with your younger students, just to talk about what AI is, how to be careful with the results, be, uh, responsible with your usage. So here what I've set up is a chat with the very hungry Caterpillar. So if you were in a kindergarten classroom, you just finished reading the book, you can actually open that conversation. And the very hungry Pat Caterpillar starts the conversation.

Um, now this can all be read aloud. We have text to speech, um, on every single tool that you can simply click the little speaker button to have it start speaking. I'm not gonna do that now because it will just keep going and we just want, you know, we wanna move on. Um, but you can have it talk to the class and then your students can actually walk up.

And ask the Caterpillar questions. So if your student wanted to, I'm gonna move this over here for a second. If your students wanted to come and chat, they could click the little, um, microphone, and then they could say something like, let's see, why did you eat all of that food? And hit next.

And so your students can practice their questioning skills. They can interview the characters from the book. They can learn, go a little bit deeper and beyond the book. Um, now there's a couple other things we can do with this that you had mentioned to me, like that we can use the interactive pieces as well.

Yeah. So this is so nice for students to be able to just walk up to the board, interact with the character. I feel like it really makes. The book and the stories come to life.

Um, and then on top of that, again, our floating tool is just such a great tool here because I can quickly come in here and have my students. I know when I taught, um, third grade, a lot of our responsibility when we were doing reading and writing was really making sure to annotate and, and write down our thinking out loud and go through and look for, you know, we asked a question, did we really get the answer to the question? And so now I can easily have my students come up.

Grab that highlighter and then they can see that, oh, this is something that they told us we have to open in order to grow big and strong, we have to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And so now they can come up and highlight an element that really shows the evidence to the answer. That also helps us really get to know the very hungry caterpillar. Exactly.

That's really neat. Um, and I would say too, it's a couple other things I'd point out. For your students if they were doing this maybe more instead of a whole group, maybe as a station activity. There's a lot of, remember, AI is adaptable.

It is, it's very personable and you can ask it to change, right? So if this was too much for your student to read by themselves, which this was, this was, you know, a lot for a kindergartner. And if even with the, the speech to text and be a lot, uh, or text to speech, they can come up and they can say something like, can you shorten this just a little bit, please. And what this does is it also teaches your students more AI literacy skills.

Like how can they interact with ai? What can they get out of it and learn its limitations as well. So c AI has shortened it quite a bit, right? It's changed the language.

You can ask it to shorten it again, you can ask it to explain it a different way if it's something that they're not quite understanding. So like I said, it's very adaptable to any grade level. So even though we're showing a kindergarten example, you could take this all the way up to a high school classroom. Change the character they're speaking to.

Maybe it's a historical figure. Maybe they're having to interview them. Maybe they're debating with them about the decisions they made through history. There's all kinds of possibilities that you could do here.

So yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. There are just so many ways I'm already.

Thinking in my head of how we can continue to not only help save teachers times, but also really getting the students to take ownership of some of that learning, getting them up in front and really interacting with not only the MagicSchool AI tools, but the Teach Your Way with BenQ tool as well. So thank you so much. Absolutely. For teachers that maybe haven't really explored MagicSchool AI yet mm-hmm.

Where would you say that they should maybe start to kind of learn more about what they can explore while they're on their que board? Great question. So on our website we have a a tab that says PD resources or resources. We have certification courses.

We have two levels, um, that are complete. They're free. Think about 15 to 20 minutes each. Um, that's a great place to start.

He'll teach you everything you need to know about MagicSchool AI. We also have all of our social media channels and our YouTube channel as well has a lot of awesome free resources. Awesome. Yeah.

Thank you so much. One of the best things about MagicSchool AI, not only does it make it easier for teachers to, um, enhance their teaching and, and really dig into those instructional elements, um, getting our students engaged, give, giving the learning in their hands, but also our partnership with MagicSchool AI makes it really easy to put this in the hands of the teachers. So I'll show you very quickly on the Teach Your Way with BenQ Board. Some of our models may look a little bit differently.

We're working here on our rp um, oh four. We've got our RPO five coming out as well that looks very similar. You'll see here I've got the MagicSchool AI app directly on my home screen. But one of the best things about Teach Your Way with BenQ is that we have our own Teach Your Way with BenQ store.

On whichever board you're working on, you can tap on your all apps Waffle and you can look for the purple shopping bag. That is our Teach Your Way with BenQ App store. This is where we house our apps that we have multiple partnerships with. And so it's so nice and easy for you to grab MagicSchool AI.

You don't have to worry about finding a play store going to anything like that. It already exists right there for you, and it's ready for you to download directly on the board so you can now start, um, exploring MagicSchool AI and getting those students interacting with the board as well. Um, thank you so much for joining the Teach Your Way with BenQ Podcast today, and we hope that you, um, take some time to go back and watch the video if you were just listening along today. And be sure to, um, have that, have that video pulled up in front of you when you're at your Teach Your Way with BenQ board so you can kind of, um, walk through the steps that Andrew showed us today on how to do all of those exciting features with MagicSchool AI.

Cool. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. If you have any questions about what you've heard or seen today on our podcast, be sure to drop a comment or a question on any of our YouTube videos, any of our channels so that we can provide extra resources and be sure to get back to you quickly.

Thanks for joining us on Teach Your Way with BenQ. For more resources and teaching inspiration, visit us online@benq.com. Don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode.