Brisk Teaching is an AI Chrome extension that will help enhance your teaching and boost students learning. With Brisk you can create engaging educational materials from online resources including YouTube videos and web content. You can also use it to grade students assignments, design presentations, create lesson plans and classroom activities and many more.
In this post, I will walk you through the different things you can do on Brisk and how you can leverage its AI-powered features to facilitate your teaching tasks.
Brisk Teaching Features
Brisk Teaching offers a wide variety of AI-drive features. These include:
1. Creating Engaging Educational Materials
One of the features I like about Brisk is the ease with which you can instantly turn any web content into engaging educational materials. With few clicks you can design effective quizzes from a YouTube video, turn the content of a web page into a presentation to use in your class, generate comprehensive lesson plans from your notes, and many more.
You can even convert content into entertaining materials such as jokes, jokes, and trivia. Brisk is like having a stand-by assistant ready to lend a helping hand anytime you want. And the great part, Brisk works on all platforms and applications including Google Docs, YouTube, Google Presentations, enabling you to create instructional materials right within your current workflow.
Besides creating educational materials, Brisk can also help with simplifying administrative tasks. For instance, you can use Brisk to quickly generate work related emails, reports, cover or recommendation letters, newsletters, and much more.
2. Grading
Another powerful feature in Brisk is the ability to quickly generate personalized feedback on students assignments within Google Docs. Brisk supports four types of feedback:
- Targeted: Use this type of feedback to provide Google Doc comments that align with your rubric and standards, ensuring clear and relevant evaluation.
- Glow & Grow: Use this type of feedback to highlight students’ strengths, point out areas for improvement, and pose probing questions for deeper reflection.
- Rubric Criteria: Use this type of feedback to give detailed responses based on each rubric criterion, offering precise and structured guidance.
- Next Steps: Use this type of feedback to suggest actionable steps and strategies that help students build and improve their core skills.
Once Brisk generates feedback and before you post it, you can go ahead and further customize it so it feels organic. You can modify it the way you want. You can add your own tone of voice, edit personalized details, and more. Any feedback you don’t like can be easily deleted. Once your feedback is ready, click to post it on your student’s work. Students will not know that you have used Brisk to generate feedback.
3. Inspect Writing
Inspect Writing, as its name indicates, is a feature in Brisk that allows you to track exactly how students have written their assignment in Google Docs. Let’s say a student submitted their Google Doc containing the essay you assigned them to write. You can click on Brisk icon, select Inspect Writing and you will have access to a video playback of their version history tracking how the student created their assignment.
You will be able to see when they worked on their assignment, how long it took them to write the essay, how many edits they made, what portions they pasted into the document, and many more. You can also use the ‘Magnify’ button to check whether there are any AI generated instances within the essay.
Inspect Writing is absolutely an excellent tool to help you grade students work. Based on its feedback, you can make more informed grading decisions by understanding each student’s writing process. You can evaluate their effort, identify whether they relied heavily on pasted content, and see how much time they invested in refining their work. This feature provides deeper insights into students’ writing habits and can guide your feedback to be more personalized and constructive.
Related: Twee – Enhance Your Teaching Using AI
4. Adjust Reading Levels
Brisk has this handy feature which allows you to assess and adjust the reading level of any digital text. If you find an online article that has a different reading level than your students’ you can simply click on the Brisk icon and the article opens in a new Google Doc. From there you will see the actual reading level of the article and you can choose any reading level you want and Brisk instantly convert it to your preferred reading level.
What’s more, you can even translate the select digital text into over 20 languages allowing you to create educational materials for diverse classrooms.
The ability to adjust reading levels will especially benefit ESL students and struggling readers, as it allows you to tailor content to their comprehension skills, making learning more accessible and engaging. Also, being able to simplify complex texts or elevate simpler ones allows you to provide reading materials that appropriately challenge students individualized reading levels. This feature also empowers teachers to differentiate instruction effectively, meeting the diverse needs of their classrooms.
5. Brisk Boost
Brisk Boost allows you to create targeted activities that boost students learning. Here is how it works: first choose an online material (e.g., Google Doc, YouTube video, or web article), click on Brisk icon and select Boost Student Activity. Choose an activity type from the selection. There are several activities to choose from including:
- Tutor: You can use this activity to provide students with personalized coaching and guidance in any subject area they need support in.
- Hook: You can use this activity to spark curiosity and engage students by presenting them with intriguing, thought-provoking questions.
- Character Chat: You can use this activity to let students interact with historical figures or book characters, deepening their understanding of key concepts.
- Debate: You can use this activity to help students develop arguments backed by evidence, fostering critical thinking and persuasive communication skills.
- Inquiry: You can use this activity to encourage students to explore concepts and form hypotheses, promoting scientific thinking and discovery.
- Brainstorm: You can use this activity to inspire students to generate fresh ideas, perfect for collaborative projects and creative problem-solving.
- Real-world Math: You can use this activity to engage students in solving math word problems rooted in real-life scenarios, making math more practical and fun.
Once you create and customize your activity, click to generate a unique link students can use to access and work on the activity. You will be able to see how students interact with the activity in real time.
Watch this video tutorial to see Brisk Teaching in action:
Final thoughts
I have been experimenting with Brisk Teaching for some time now and I found it very helpful. It combines multiple AI features into a single platform allowing you to facilitate your teaching tasks in unprecedented ways. If you have not tried it out yet, I high recommend you give it a try and as always share your feedback with us on our social media websites.
