For much of the previous decade, advocates of education technology imagined a classroom where computer algorithms would differentiate instruction for each student, delivering just the right lessons at the right time, like a personal tutor. The evidence that students learn better this way has not been strong and, instead, we're reading reports that technology use at school sometimes hurts student achievement. So it was interesting to see McKinsey & Co., an elite consulting firm, reframe the argument for buying education technology away from computerized instruction to something more pedestrian: saving teachers time. A January 2020 report by the firm estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of the 50 hours that a typical teacher currently works a week could be saved through existing automation technology, often enabled by artificial intelligence (AI). That adds up to 13 saved hours a week, hours of freedom that could help relieve teacher burnout.

Nisha Rataria remembers the moment that she understood the power of technology to significantly improve a child's learning and comprehension. As a teacher at the public Vidhya Nagar Primary School in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Rataria teaches students from across the spectrum – bright, struggling, poor and middle class. A few years ago, her school implemented an artificial-intelligence based education program called EnglishHelper that provides a suite of tools to help children learn to speak, read and write English. Many of her students, who she says could not even recognize the alphabet, could now read English with some confidence. By the end of the 2019-2020 school year, EnglishHelper and ReadToMe could be used by nearly 20 million students worldwide.

Artificial intelligence is making its way into a variety of education technologies. Here, vendors talk about their current and future work with AI in the higher education space. In 2015, when Georgia Institute of Technology professor Ashok Goel experimented with using an artificial intelligence-based teaching assistant called "Jill Watson" to answer students' questions in online forums, it opened a lot of eyes to the potential of AI on campus. But there remained a lot of well-founded skepticism about how algorithms would be deployed. For instance, in 2016 AdmitHub CEO Andrew Magliozzi contacted universities to ask if they would like to incorporate an AI chatbot into their recruitment and retention strategy.

AMT is one of the many commercial services with which humans provide the raw material on which artificial intelligence is trained. Such developments should make us question the growing number of education-technology practices now in place at colleges across the country.

A really cool way to engage an audience is using live polls in your PowerPoint presentations. What's great about this is if you ask the audience a question, instead of having them shout out their answers or writing their responses on a flip chart, you can have them respond on their mobile devices so you can see the results appear in real time on the slide. This can work with all types of questions – from multiple choice, to free response, to (my favorite) word clouds. Watch the video below or scroll down the page to see how to get started with live polling in PowerPoint today.