Using Amazon Alexa as an Instructional Tool During Remote Teaching

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures across the country have altered the way educators teach and provide services to students. Engaging technologies in learning environments have become the primary mechanism delivering curriculum and maintaining the intellectual wellbeing of student...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Teaching exceptional children 2020-11, Vol.53 (2), p.164-167
Main Authors: Emerling, Christopher R., Yang, Sohyun, Carter, Richard A., Zhang, Ling, Hunt, Tiffany
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence
Audio Equipment
COVID-19
Distance Education
Pandemics
School Closing
Task Analysis
Technology Uses in Education
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures across the country have altered the way educators teach and provide services to students. Engaging technologies in learning environments have become the primary mechanism delivering curriculum and maintaining the intellectual wellbeing of students. With the accelerated expansion of technologies across the K-12 curriculum, students' opportunities to engage with education-focused artificial intelligence (AI) software have increased (Touretzky et al., 2019). Students are beginning to interact with and orient themselves to AI through the use of home devices, such an Amazon Alexa (Jones, 2019). Many families and educators already have an Alexa device in their home that provides simple interactions with immediate feedback. Users can access Alexa's built-in functionalities, such as using search engines, providing weather information, or playing their favorite song (Wang, 2017). Any developer with knowledge of code can build the skills through the Alexa Voice Service platform (Amazon Alexa, n.d.). Amazon also provides users with premade blueprints for Alexa that are shells of skills made to be used by users of all technological abilities. The blueprints offer the average user guidance to create customized and personal voice user interface activities. In this article, the authors propose the use of AI devices, Amazon Alexa, and their prebuilt blueprints as an emerging form of educational technology. Educators can adapt the established blueprints to meet the needs of their students, mainly to help support distance-learning initiatives.
ISSN:0040-0599
2163-5684
DOI:10.1177/0040059920964719