The idea behind Chatbots is great as it provides many learning opportunities for students. The research suggests Chatbots are an important aspect in the 21st century classroom as AI is able to respond to simple questions and give reminders taking less pressure off of the teacher. After familiarizing myself a little bit with the different Chatbot platforms such as Dialogflow, I am unsure if I would use any of these because of the following reason. First off, one of the videos shows how to program a chatbot to answer the question "What time is it?" It was neat watching how to program the Chatbot however, it seemed time consuming with many programming steps considering I have a smartphone where I can ask Siri that same time question and get an immediate response. Siri is also considered a Chatbot and can answer many questions, look up information, respond to questions with facts, etc. From an educational standpoint, I did like how some of the Chatbot platforms created scenarios and puzzles based on responses. After getting past the initial hurdle of learning how to use the platform and coding the Bot, I believe teachers could definitely benefit from using them in their classroom to engage and assist their students.
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This was an interesting and fun presentation. I've never heard of ChatBots, but I could see how this platform can be used in many classroom settings. Even though we are calling it a game, I think it would be a fun way to create a "study game" for students. Or it could even be used as a pre-test for the student, or "quiz your knowledge". If more teachers knew about this, I think they would be open to try it in their classrooms.
Until this presentation, I had never heard about ChatBots. I am intrigued by the possibilities of this platform. I think if I was to use ChatBots, I would use it as an effective tool to build escape room type games in the classroom. For a beginning teacher to Chatbots, this could be a way to review content prior to any type of formal assessment. Students would enjoy the game based concept but also be able to demonstrate their knowledge of the material as well. Once a teacher figures out the nuances of the program, the possibilities to use the program for more than just proofreading or simple worksheets will showcase the benefits of ChatBots in education.
This is more of an idea for school or business administrators, but I could definitely see using a chatbot as a website directory. At our school, we are phasing in a new e-mail system and LMS. Although there are a lot of benefits to doing this, in the short term, day to day experience, it often means that students, teachers, and parents don't know where to find things that they used to be able to find. I'm picturing a chatbot where users can ask "where do I find the schedule for Remembrance Day" or "where do I find the camping trip permission forms" and then the chatbot either responds with a description of the place or even a link. Out of curiosity, do the chatbot authoring tools generate embed code that can be dropped into other websites? Which ones are better for that?
I sound like a broken record with some instructions in my technology classes. I never even though of creating a chatbot, but you better believe it is happening soon. Thank you for all of your work. I especially liked the 3 sample bots. Really well done.
@cowenkatie51, I agree - I quickly learned that there would be a lot of work required in programming something that may have been as easily answered by Siri, Alexa ... or Google. The trick was to find something specific and imagine how the students would interact with it - in my case, going with choices meant avoiding the myriad potential questions or comments that might not be recognized by my simple bot.
Hi Chatbot team! Your instructor created chatbots and associated thinking revealed a lot about how/if chatbots will be easily adopted into classrooms. Based on your experiences and chatbot products, there is a detailed process to get a comprehensive chatbot up and running -- one that is beyond transactional and more personalized. I don't have a classroom and am not a teacher, but if I consider chatbots in the context of the MET program, I can see a informational chatbot being very useful for assignment-related questions that come up in the courses. I suspect questions from term to term for any given assignment are very similar. If chatbots were created to handle these questions, it would go a long way in time a professor has to take to respond to emails or Mattermost posts or the like. And it would cut down on the time between the students' question(s) and the response.
Really interesting and engaging presentation. I don't think I've thought much about chat bots for a long time. Whenever I think of automated assistants, I immediately think of the much maligned Clippy from Microsoft Word.
I think Chat bots might be very useful to teachers as a means of having students reflect on their work before submitting it. Having a chat bot go through a checklist or rubric with a student might prove to be more engaging that a simple paper and pen exercise. Having a friendly chat bot type out "Have you made sure that you have a topic sentence at the start of each paragraph?" and waiting for an answer could humanize what is usually a dull proofreading process. That said, I'd probably prefer if the student would work more socially with his/her peers rather than interact in solitude with a computer.