Harnessing AI for Bilingual Education

August 11, 2024
Luis Hernández

Category: AI in Education, EdTech

Recently, I had the privilege of conducting a couple of presentations for teachers, focusing on how we can harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance bilingual education. These sessions were not only informative but also an opportunity to explore the rapidly evolving landscape of educational technology and its impact on our daily work as educators.

During the presentations, I covered a range of topics, including various AI tools and apps that teachers can use to simplify their tasks. One of the most popular tools discussed was Magic School AI, a user-friendly application that has been making waves since its launch in 2023. If you’re interested in learning more about Magic School AI and how it can support your teaching, I encourage you to visit their mission page.

While Magic School AI is a fantastic tool for its simplicity, I also emphasized the potential of more advanced AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. These platforms offer users complete control over the interactions they have with AI, allowing for the creation of custom assistants tailored to specific needs. By uploading your own documents and leveraging best practices in prompt engineering (a topic I delved into during my presentation), you can develop AI assistants that handle various tasks efficiently. This customization is powerful, enabling teachers to create different assistants for different tasks, streamlining our workload.

Of course, it’s crucial to remember that when using AI tools, we must be vigilant about not uploading private information from students or school districts to any platform, including Magic School AI. However, there are countless tasks where these AI assistants can be incredibly beneficial, helping us manage our responsibilities more effectively.

To help you get started, I’ve created a comprehensive guide based on my presentation on harnessing AI for bilingual education. This document includes best practices for prompt engineering and instructions on accessing these AI assistants. I invite you to download this guide and stay tuned for more materials and support that I’ll be providing. I believe these tools can not only enhance our work but also help us maximize our time—an asset that’s always in short supply given our roles as teachers, parents, and so much more.

Let’s continue exploring how AI can transform our classrooms and empower us to be the best educators we can be!

Verónica Speaks Twelve Languages. The Hard Part Was the Rules.

Verónica, the AI tutor inside our courses and apps, now responds in twelve languages. Arabic, Telugu, Tamil, and Korean joined because districts and teacher preparation faculty kept describing the families they serve. Adding the languages was never the hard part, since these models were multilingual from the start. The hard part was the rules: which characters even count as letters, whether the page or the person gets to decide, and when a tutor should hold the target language instead of following a student into English. Here is what broke, what we changed, and why it matters.

A Certificate No One Can Verify. It Is Just a File.

Most professional certificates share one weakness: confirming they are real means contacting the issuer and waiting, so in practice it rarely happens. A PDF can be edited in a browser. A paper certificate proves only that someone owned a printer. This post makes the case for digital credentials for both learners and institutions, looks at what the 2026 hiring research actually shows, explains why course completion is the wrong trigger for issuing one, and describes transparently how our scored capstone gates work, why we chose the Proof of Knowledge platform, and what we would tell any institution starting from zero.

Claude for Teachers: Anthropic’s Free Program for Educators

On July 14, 2026, Anthropic announced Claude for Teachers, a program that gives verified K-12 educators in the United States a full year of free access to premium Claude capabilities. It includes a teaching skills library, lesson planning grounded in evidence-based curricula, class data analysis, and integrations with nine school tools. In this post, we break down what teachers actually get, the privacy commitments behind the program, and the honest caveats, including US-only eligibility. We also added a complete Claude for Teachers topic to our free course, Boosting Productivity with AI for Teachers.

Chalkboard reading Language Learning beside German, English, and Spanish dictionaries, for the Enabling Learning post on building AI language-learning tutors.

A Good LLM Doesn’t Make a Good Teacher

When people learn that our speaking apps run on advanced AI, they ask which model we use. It is the least interesting part of the story. Choosing a capable model is the easy part; any developer can connect to one. What decides whether a learner actually improves is whether the system understands how people learn to speak a second language. That knowledge does not come from the model. It comes from us, from years in bilingual classrooms, instructional design, and second language acquisition research. This post is about how we build AI tutors as educators, not just engineers.

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Verónica Speaks Twelve Languages. The Hard Part Was the Rules.

A Certificate No One Can Verify. It Is Just a File.

Claude for Teachers: Anthropic’s Free Program for Educators

A Good LLM Doesn’t Make a Good Teacher