When Clarity Uses AI

New AI technologies seem to be coming to market every week which begs the question, "How might it enhance productivity and creativity while also leveraging our invaluable human experience and expertise?" At Clarity Innovations, we embrace the possibilities of AI while also cautiously exploring, experimenting, and evaluating new tools that leverage this technology.

For nearly a year, our social feeds, news cycles, and industry publications have been inundated with articles about how AI is going to affect our lives, our jobs, and maybe most importantly, education. It can be a lot to navigate, especially when that pace of innovation seems to be accelerating. When it comes to organizations making decisions about using AI, particularly generative AI, there are a lot of considerations and grey areas. A good guiding policy is necessary to navigate the use of generative AI. It also requires a strategy for determining which tools are best for different purposes and circumstances.

"All these AI-powered tools help free us from repetitive or monotonous tasks, providing us with the valuable time and energy to focus on the work that really matters: envisioning, designing, and building the future of education.”

We use AI-powered tools for various purposes to help multiply our effectiveness. We use AI-powered tools to check grammar, remove distracting backgrounds or blemishes from images, search stock photography, automate transitions in animations, perform language translations, transcribe interviews, and adjust readability levels of human-generated content.

Even though we don’t use generative AI to create deliverables directly, we do use it for inspiration in a variety of ways. When we utilize mega prompts, generative AI can help us brainstorm ideas. Even with its flaws, it can help us see things from different perspectives. For example, it has been helpful as a natural language thesaurus or headline editor to suggest better ways to phrase things or create eye-catching titles. We have asked it to generate a list of creative and engaging social media post ideas, but our team still writes the posts from scratch.

Occasionally, we test out the capabilities of new generative AI tools and share the results with each other, which can be humorous, entertaining, or downright terrible. We have conversations around the implications of generative AI on work, teaching, learning, design, productivity, and society in general. With our focus on the future of K-12 education, these conversations regularly delve into the pedagogical implications and concerns about student data and privacy. This experimentation and discourse helps us stay up-to-date with the latest tools, their capabilities, and the ethical concerns surrounding them.

Using AI for Productivity

Like all new technologies, we are like moths—drawn to the bright and shiny light every time. We welcome emerging technologies like AI and take our time to evaluate its promises and pitfalls for our work and, more broadly, for how it applies to K-12 education. Our team embraces change, always looking for ways to leverage technology to streamline our work and make it less arduous. When we conduct interviews for our clients, we use cutting-edge transcription tools like Otter.ai, Microsoft Teams, or Rev. These tools allow us to concentrate on the interview itself, without worrying about taking notes or transcribing afterward, as they can automatically transcribe the interview for us. Remember when you were told by an educator to read your work aloud to catch awkward phrases and grammar errors? Now you can automate that with AI-powered text-to-speech tools, which read your work aloud and let you edit the text along the way in real-time.

Some forms of AI-powered tools work behind the scenes. Bayesian algorithms and machine learning help us maintain clean and organized inboxes free of spam, phishing attempts, and malware. Our calendars employ AI-based features that help us better plan our work, highlight optimal meeting times based on team members’ availability, and automatically create to-do items. We also rely on AI-powered expense reporting to scan and categorize receipts, which saves us from the tedious and time-consuming task of manually writing them up. All these AI-powered tools help free us from repetitive or monotonous tasks, providing us with the valuable time and energy to focus on the work that really matters: envisioning, designing, and building the future of education.

The Future of AI at Clarity

AI has tremendous potential. It is a valuable tool that enhances our productivity and creativity. It assists us in various aspects of our work, from organization and communication to brainstorming and problem-solving. However, we will always approach AI as a supplementary resource, never as a replacement for the unique combination of human experience and expertise that our team brings to each client project.

As we explore the power of various AI tools, we remain mindful of the importance of responsible and ethical usage and understand it’s the dawn of a new era, with significant ambiguity and possibility. The pace of innovation shows no sign of slowing, and we continue to explore, experiment, evaluate, and learn from each new advancement in AI. It’s an exciting time to be designing and building the future of education. Contact us today to learn more about how we’re helping our clients take an ethical and responsible approach to using AI in their solutions.