At Cudahy Middle School in Wisconsin, special education teacher Anna Adl has dedicated her career to teaching students with learning disabilities. With a background that spans early childhood education to middle school special education, and as a board member for the Council for Exceptional Children, Anna brings deep expertise and passion to the classroom. But in today’s world of rising costs and constrained resources, she, like many educators, is always looking for ways to be more efficient while improving the learning experience for her students.
That’s where AI-Learners comes in.
A winner of a 2023 Tools Competition Catalyst Prize, AI-Learners is designed specifically to support students with diverse learning needs. The platform has become an essential part of Anna’s teaching toolkit. In any special education class, there are students with all kinds of abilities, disabilities, and learning levels, and AI-Learners helps teachers quickly and easily differentiate materials for all of their students.
“There are days when I will spend hours and hours just looking for just the right approach, and this will just spit it out in 30 seconds,” she said.
As an example, Anna explained how she recently had her youngest students working on identifying “CVC words” – three-letter words containing a letter pattern of consonant, vowel, consonant. These CVC words are used to help young learners develop phonics skills by recognizing and blending sounds. But some of her students weren’t ready for that lesson, and needed to improve their general letter recognition skills instead. Those students used AI-Learners for that, while their classmates used the platform to practice CVC words.
“AI-Learners helps meet students where they are by creating independent practice in a variety of areas with little effort on my part,” Anna said.
This is no small matter, as teachers generally are only given less than an hour a day to plan lessons for all of their classes. Any tool or technique that can help them make the most of that time is invaluable, she said.
One feature she particularly likes about AI-Learners is its ability to help her create “social stories” – quick exercises that help students understand how to handle new social situations and meet classroom expectations. Anna uses AI-Learners to create personalized stories that help students recognize social cues and meet behavioral expectations both in the classroom and when navigating unfamiliar situations, like when on a field trip. AI-Learners can take information about individual students from Anna and generate customized social stories that reflect real-life scenarios that those students will encounter, making the lessons more relevant and easier to grasp.
AI-Learners was started by Adele Smolansky, a 2023 graduate of Cornell University, who was inspired to develop the platform by her sister, Lara, who was born with a severe neurological disorder. Adele developed the first iteration of AI-Learners with classmates at Cornell in 2020. The platform is now in use at over 25 schools by more than 1,200 educators.
The platform also aligns lessons to state standards, which greatly reduces the amount of time Anna spends writing Individualized Education Plans. Those government-mandated plans must be developed in harmony with state academic standards, and explicitly delineate how teachers are meeting those standards.
“This takes the guesswork out of what standard I’m addressing,” she said.
Yet for teachers like Anna, who are constantly looking for ways to do more with less, platforms like AI-Learners offer a powerful solution: one that saves time, supports IEP compliance, enhances student understanding, and most importantly, helps every student succeed.
