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!

How We Use AI, and Why Our Digital Credentials Require Evidence

When we talk about our work with educators, at conferences and with universities, two questions come up: how do we use AI, and what does our digital credential actually prove? We answered both in writing, in two new pages on our website. The first is a note from our founder, Luis J. Hernández, on how an educator came to build with AI and where we draw the line. The second explains why our digital credentials are issued only when a learner shows the skill, and why that matters for learners and the institutions that prepare them.

A single objectives card pinned on an elementary classroom wall, with a stack of cards for the rest of the week on the teacher's desk.

One Objective on the Wall. Five Levels in the Room.

Principals want the ELPS posted, but one classroom holds students at five proficiency levels. How do you post one objective for all of them? We answered with something teachers can print and use, the Objectives Card in the ELPS Online Helper: one content objective, one language objective, and a strip showing what meeting it looks like at each level. Here is what it does, what we added after seeing how teachers used it, including a week planner and cards for lessons taught in Spanish, and why it matters in a dual-language classroom.

Layered translucent glass panes suspended in dark blue space, each etched with glowing abstract letterforms from a different writing system, overlapping and interlocking where the panes cross.

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.

Harnessing AI for Bilingual Education

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How We Use AI, and Why Our Digital Credentials Require Evidence

One Objective on the Wall. Five Levels in the Room.

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

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