Chennai: Premium artificial intelligence (AI) tools have entered govt model school campuses with headmasters spending up to ₹1 lakh on annual subscriptions for platforms such as Claude to teach students better.For instance, teachers at Saidapet’s Centre for Academic Excellence (CoAE) — the premium model school in the city where the initiative was piloted — use these platforms to generate codes and develop a dashboard. “A student’s test results are entered into the dashboard, which categorises the data and shows how a student has performed in each. Teachers can use this to understand where they need to focus,” said Manikandan, JEE coordinator, TN Model Schools.Developers are employed to create the dashboard from the code, through platforms such as GitHub, and a teacher’s expertise is used in giving prompts to generate questions for students. “Teachers were trained beforehand in basics of data analysis to read trends better. Students are re-taught the topics they struggle with, and given supporting subjects and worksheets,” said Senthilvalavan, headmaster, CoAE.Tamil Nadu has 38 model schools, one per district, which share the platforms with other schools in neighbouring districts. Besides Claude, Gemini is used for illustration and image generation.“Every school has more than 30 tablets. Students, especially those who are taking entrance exams, are given these devices after class hours and encouraged to use the internet to take online assessments,” said a trainer at Chengalpet model school.Senthilvalavan said the tools will come in handy for entrance exams such as JEE that test students on their problem-solving speed and ability to avoid errors under pressure. “The tools help analyse where a student needs more help. This can widen the pool of students who clear cut-off,” he added.When asked if this could be implemented across all schools, school education director P Naresh said the possibility could be explored, but the department will lean towards training teachers with the data. “Data obtained from answer sheets can be used to train teachers, encourage them to tweak their teaching methodology to cater to all students. It is also to be kept in mind that the volume of students is larger in regular schools,” he added.
