Book Review: The AI Classroom by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein

This week's review is on The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein.

There are many guides out there as authors rush to produce a book-length (and book cost) version of "AI for dummies in education" guides. The AI Classroom, fortunately, is not a rush job and does an adequate job of introducing the key concepts and some tools for educators.

A solid overview of AI in education.

The authors are all at the forefront of artificial intelligence in the education field. Dan, in particular, has been a valuable resource - hosting calls on various tools, and writing additional books. I would recommend following their work as AI continues to change and adapt.

This book into four major sections - the heart of which is the middle two. The first part, "The AI Uprising" provides some background on AI, its growth, and a broad introduction. The second, "The AI Educator," takes the first part and zeroes in on the educational aspects - highlighting pedagogy, prompting, and applying AI to classroom tasks, such as UDL, citation, research, and more.

The third section is an overview of many tools - with information on their use, cost, applications, and examples. This can be helpful for those seeking a hard copy book; but suffers from being out of date to some degree - information many have changed, other tools might have surpassed those mentioned, and some of the tools may no longer function.

The final section aims to do a bit of forecasting and seemed generally hazy - offering a tepid approach to AI Citizenship and Ethics without diving too deeply into the area. This is another area where the book could have done more - but - like many areas of the AI field - in an overview text, the shorter approach suffices.

A relatively quick read and a nice overview - or even a great text for a faculty study - The AI Classroom won't help teachers dive deeper into AI but will help them get their toes into the water. Please note, a friend and colleague, Dr. John Wick, helped edit this book but he did not know I would review, nor did he provide me any information.

The AI Classroom: The Ultimate Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Education by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Amanda Fox, and Brad Weinstein.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Good For: Teachers looking for an introductory guide to AI in Education or recommendations in a book form.

Best nugget: The Edit Matrix (101): An approach to Evaluating, Determining, Identifying, and Transforming content and output from an LLM.

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