I found the frontier poll topic of “Siri and Her Siblings” very interesting and I thought I’d find more related resources.
Although personal assistant technologies like Siri, Google Home, and Alexa were not designed for educational purposes, they are already being used for at-home learning. Here is an article on how it’s affecting education: https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2020/09/what-schools-need-know-about-voice-assistants.
According to the article, personal assistants have the potential for:
- Digital equity
- Communal learning
- Connected communication
- Personalization
My opinion is that personal assistants can be a tool for providing differentiated learning for students. If there are students that require some form of instructional accommodations in a classroom, maybe Siri can come in and provide that. Maybe there will be a way to “program” Google Assistant to provide specific accommodations or support in a learning environment. I can also see this as a beneficial tool for ELL students who may be struggling with vocabularies and/or grammar.
As Neiffer (2018) mentioned in his study, personal assistants will become a greater factor in classrooms, but very careful implementation and further studies would need to be done.
References
Neiffer, J. P. (2018). Intelligent personal assistants in the classroom: Impact on student engagement. Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 11241. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11241
Hi Seo – Whi Kwon:
I am very glad that this article skimmed through some of the challenges that educators would go through trying to incorporate these technologies into the classroom. The hardest part right now with incorporating any device into a university classroom is the splash screen to access the campus wifi. Until you accept that user agreement for a device with a physical screen, no access is possible. Either university campuses resolve this problem, or the industry adds a feature to the device to accept the user agreement of the splash screen. This area of barriers in digital devices may be a good topic to bring up in any of our smaller assignments. Just a thought.