AI was a hot topic at ISTELive 2024 and continues to be in the educational space. As such, Merlyn Mind has been working to support its responsible use in the classroom, said Merlyn Mind Chief Revenue Officer Levi Belnap.
The Big AI Question
“To use AI in the classroom, it had to be built differently, so we started from the ground up,” said Belnap. “The team had the capability to build models, so we were building models and voice recognition technology and automation technology long before other companies and other large language models. From the beginning, the idea of responsible AI built on safe and effective models that are not biased, we started with that. And we have put our models to the test.”
Using language models in school can seem like a risky proposition, especially with the wealth of knowledge AI has access to. This is why Merlyn Mind has minimized that risk with their classroom offering.
“How do we make sure that anything going in and out of [the AI model] is appropriate for classrooms?” said Belnap. “Whenever you interact with Merlyn Mind, it’s not just hitting that chat chip like most AI tools are these days. It’s actually using models that we built with filters and appropriateness. These are models that we have built to ask, ‘Is that a question that should be asked in education?’ If the answer is yes, then we get an answer to the question. Then we ask, ‘Is the answer something that should be provided in education?’ So this level of safety, security, and privacy is the foundation of why we thought a company needed to be built to build AI for education.”
How Merlyn Benefits Teachers
AI in the classroom has the unique opportunity to lighten the load we ask our teachers to bear everyday.
“Merlyn has built the solution that comes into the environment that exists today in the classroom and makes it easier to teach in that environment, so that they instantly have more time to spend teaching and give active instruction,” said Belnap. “Many people today assume that AI now means generative AI chat interfaces, and Merlyn has a component of that because we think that that is a really powerful part of AI.”
But how does a teacher with a classroom full of students, multiple devices, a lesson plan, and grades benefit by using Merlyn?
“We started with the idea of ‘What if we make it easier to teach in that reality?’” said Belnap. “So now, with Merlyn, from anywhere in the room, I have this really cool remote that connects to my laptop, and I can push a button on it, give it a command, and it obeys. It can open my lesson plan for the day. It can set a timer for any length of time. It can recognize a teacher’s voice so they can be anywhere in the classroom. That’s the thing we hear back from educators all the time, that they had to go back and forth to their laptops all day just to do little things.”