The amount of generative artificial intelligence tools available to educators today is astounding. This can make choosing tools and knowing where to start your artificial intelligence journey overwhelming. The beauty of artificial intelligence is that it allows you to focus on heart work or people work rather than paperwork. So as I have vetted tools for our district, my focus has been on tools that will help speed up the tasks that become pain points for our educators and specifically for our special educators as the amount of paperwork required of us can seem insurmountable.

I’ve organized the toolkit for special education service providers by tasks. My goal was to start with a small set of tools that make a big impact. This means that I tried not to list as many tools as possible that complete the same tasks, rather, I listed the tasks and found tools that would complete the most tasks by logging into the least amount of tools as possible. This proves to be less overwhelming for most people – less passwords to remember and less interfaces to navigate!

From writing IEPs to creating social stories and changing the reading level of a text, customizing is the name of the game in special education (and for any teacher wanting to meet the individual needs of students). Customizing takes a lot of our time and often it needs to be done quickly on the fly. It doesn’t matter how prepared you try to be unexpected changes in the general ed curriculum or class activities cause us to scramble to prepare our students to be successful.

It’s important to note that matching tools to tasks was not the only stipulation when choosing tools to be in the toolkit. As with any tools we are going to use in the school setting, we have to choose tools that protect student privacy (as well as staff privacy) and that follow all the school district, state, and federal guidelines, including being COPPA and FERPA compliant. To that end, the tools listed in this toolkit, also met the following:

• Must not fail the privacy rating by Common Sense Media
• Must be FERPA and COPPA compliant
• Must follow district media use guidelines
• Must not contain violence or sexually explicit material

Plus, everything listed in the toolkit is free! While several of the tools have features you can pay for, the tasks listed are available with the free version of the tools listed. Paid versions of the tools may give you extra conveniences like further customization or prompting capabilities. Some of the premium features also give you more export options, however, the free version of all the tools listed will complete the tasks as indicated.

The tools chosen for the AI Toolkit for SpEd Service Providers include:

• Curipod– for creating interactive presentations
• MagicSchool AI -for generating social stories, drafting IEPs, creating lesson plans and much more
• Canva Magic Studio– for text to image and collaborative whiteboard feature
• Goblin Tools– for breaking tasks into a manageable to do list
• Seeing AI/Google Lookout – to give our students access to hearing printed text on their mobile device
• Brisk- to inspect student writing with a history of edits and pastes and create lesson plans

Look for the video camera on the list of tools- this indicates there’s a demo video for the task.

The tasks in the toolkit will be updated regularly as these programs are frequently adding new features!