This year’s Future of Education Technology Conference in Orlando concluded last month, as it always does, with a showcase of ed-tech innovations most likely to dazzle and help educators in the coming years. From video and audio translators to text summarizers, transcription tools, music generators, research curators, essay graders and networking platforms, the bulk of the attention at the TECHShare Live session was on inclusiveness, accessibility and efficiency.
Co-leading the Jan. 17 event, Leslie Fisher, director of Fisher Technologies Inc., said the technological breakthroughs driving many new artificial intelligence (AI) tools could be game-changers for students with learning disabilities.
“With AI booming, more and more I go back to me as a child and how much I struggled in school … I think of all the educators who went out of their way to help me, because I was doing things like scoring an 8/100 on a bubble test … until eight years ago, I met an eye specialist who was like, ‘You have something called binocular vision dysfunction. You might have dyslexia, but you have binocular vision dysfunction,’” she said. “When all of a sudden I could click a magnifying glass and search, I began to learn more effectively.”
Alongside Fisher was Adam Phyall III, director of professional learning and leadership for the advocacy group All4Ed; and Adam Bellow, co-founder and CEO of the game-based platform Breakout EDU, who demoed many dozens of new or cutting-edge AI-driven tools before thousands of conference attendees.
These were just a few:
- Rask AI — an AI-powered video localization platform that allows users to translate and dub video content in over 130 languages in their own voice.
- Padlet.com — a real-time collaborative web platform in which users can upload, organize and share content to virtual bulletin boards, or “padlets.”
- Cleanup.pictures — a user-friendly photo editing tool for removing unwanted objects, people, text or defects from images by simply brushing over the areas.
- AI for Busy Readers — a tool that uses the science of writing to break up text and isolate important points.
- K12Leaders — a free social platform specifically for K-12 communities, described by Phyall as “if LinkedIn, Reddit, Coursera and Facebook built a community for K-12.”
- Descript — an audio and video editing platform that can not only transcribe recordings, but allow users to edit them by modifying the transcripts. In other words, excising “ums” and “ahs” or whole sentences from the transcript will automatically remove those sections from the video or audio file.
- Watch Duty — an app created by a retired firefighter that allows users to check whether specific addresses have been affected by a natural disaster.
- Copilot Voice — a feature in Microsoft’s AI assistant that can hold realistic conversations, create and manage desktop flows, generate typed responses to questions and help brainstorm ideas, among other things.
- NotebookLM — a tool built with Google’s Gemini 2.0 that allows users to input a set of sources and then curate any available information about a given subject from them. It can also create multimedia content, such as a podcast, based on the results, offering different ways a user might best absorb the information. “Interactive mode” allows the user to participate in the podcast and ask questions.
- Google Learn About — instead of the usual Google search providing one AI-generated page, this tool pulls results from various sources and makes them clickable.
- Vurbo.ai — a tool that could be used with an AirPod or a lapel mic to transcribe speech and automatically translate it.
- Suno — a tool that can create a song based on a description.
“You might be teaching art or music and say, ‘Hold on … technology cannot replace creativity,’ but it is a tool that I think is an incredibly powerful one to have in our toolkit,” Bellow said. “So I understand the arguments for and against this. I am not here to tell you, ‘Yes, your kids should no longer take art and music, let’s have them do all the AI generation stuff.’ That is not what I’m saying, but … there are ways to use this as a tool to augment what’s there.” - CoGrader — a free AI-assisted essay grading tool for teachers.
- Ethiqly — an AI-assisted grading tool that gives detailed feedback and analytics.
- Meshy — an AI 3D model generator that combines model making with 3D printing.
- v0 — an AI-powered tool that can create a website from prompts that describe the desired purpose, features and functions.
- Act-One from Runway — an imaging tool that can create moving images from still ones.
Bellow stressed that the idea of these new tools isn’t to adopt technology for its own sake, but to harness the power to unleash the potential in every learner.
“We have to stop fearing this as educators and embrace what could happen when we imagine the possibilities that these tools give us. We all must remember how magical devices like the first iPhone felt … Now, technology should be ‘magical’ for five minutes, because then it’s either useful or it’s in the way,” he said. “As much as I love all of this stuff … the filter of ‘what’s useful and how can we use it in our classroom to enhance the lives of our students or ourselves’ is really the litmus test for all of us.”
