ai was a hot topic at ISTELive 2024 and remains so in education, which is why Merlyn Mind has been working to support its responsible use in the classroom, said Merlyn Mind Chief Revenue Officer Levi Belnap.
<h2 id="the-big-ai-question”>The big question of ai
“To use ai in the classroom, you had to design it differently, so we started from scratch,” Belnap said. “The team had the ability to create models, so we were already creating models and voice recognition technology and automation technology long before other companies and other big language models. From the beginning, the idea of responsible ai based on safe and effective models that are not biased, we started with that. And we have put our models through their paces.”
Using language models in school can seem like a risky proposition, especially with the wealth of knowledge ai has access to. That’s why Merlyn Mind has minimized that risk with its classroom offering.
“How do we make sure that everything that goes in and out of[the ai model]is appropriate for classrooms?” Belnap said. “Whenever you interact with Merlyn Mind, it’s not just hitting that chat chip like most ai tools these days. It’s actually using models that we built with filters and suitability. They’re models that we’ve 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 it was necessary to build a company to develop ai for education.”
How Merlyn benefits teachers
ai in the classroom has a unique opportunity to lighten the load we ask of our teachers every day.
“Merlyn has created a solution that fits into the classroom environment that exists today and makes it easier to teach in that environment so that students have more time to spend actively teaching and instructing,” Belnap said. “Today, a lot of people assume that ai means generative ai chat interfaces, and Merlyn has a component of that because we think that’s 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 from using Merlyn?
“We started with the idea of, ‘What if we made teaching easier in that reality?’” Belnap said. “Now, with Merlyn, from anywhere in the room, I have a really cool remote that plugs into my laptop, and I can press a button, give it a command, and the computer obeys. It can pull up my lesson plan for the day. It can set a timer for any period of time. It can recognize a teacher’s voice so it can be anywhere in the classroom. That’s what we heard from educators all the time, that they had to go back and forth to their laptops all day just to do little things.”
