Artificial Intelligence Powered Virtual Classroom is EdTech Finalist and CUNY Initiative Recipient

Teaching with Grace – an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered virtual classroom for Inclusive Teaching Practice was a finalist in the EdTech Awards 2023 program from EdTech Digest in the category of Professional Development Learning Solution.

Teaching with Grace was also awarded $22,000 from the CUNY initiative, Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE), to develop a computational thinking task to support teachers in learning state computational thinking standards and developing pedagogy to nurture P through 12 student thinking skills.

Rhonda Bondie’s research in the Hunter College Learning Lab explores how technology can facilitate the development of teaching expertise for inclusive classrooms. Teaching with Grace provides a consequence-free, data-rich virtual environment for novice and experienced teachers to practice listening to students and responding to specific student learning strengths and needs. Without the constraint of time in a real lesson, teachers can erase time to start over and pause to gain automaticity with constructing effective high quality feedback. Teaching with Grace supports the development of adaptive teaching expertise needed to respond to the wider range of learning differences students bring to their learning post COVID. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables teachers to receive in-the-moment visualizations of data on student variance and their teaching responses.

Teaching with Grace enables new opportunities for teaching practice, a critical component of all teacher education, including the potential for professional learning, ethics, and challenges. Teaching with Grace was initiated through the Reach Every Reader grant at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Hunter School of Education is on the forefront on exploring new technologies in teacher education including the opportunities, ethics, and challenges.