Since its inception, artificial intelligence has raised many questions in education. Among them is understanding its role in the classroom, where it has been seen as both a tool and potential issue for learning. But the question of whether AI will be used by teachers may no longer be up for debate.
A Slippery Rock University alumnus is providing solutions. Thomas Thompson, ’19, is pioneering the use of AI for educators through his co-founding of Eduaide.Ai. Founded in 2023, Eduaide.Ai has already equipped more than 800,000 teachers with educationally tailored AI tools to help deliver instructional material to students.
After graduating from SRU with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, Thompson spent five years teaching in classrooms across Maryland. During this time, he observed common problems in the field of education, specifically burnout and accessibility of quality instructional materials.
“The first idea was answering a basic question: How do you build excellence in a field that struggles to retain talent?” Thompson said. “Additionally, how do you get high-quality instructional materials in the hands of every teacher?”
Having completed his Master of Science in educational technology at Johns Hopkins University in 2023, Thompson has always held an interest in the intersection of education and technology.
Eduaide.Ai has more than 100 tools to help teachers prepare every layer of instructional planning with the basics offered to individual teachers for free. From creating tailored instructional material to thinking about ways to approach a lesson, the tools will adjust material based on what grade level is being taught and what specific needs or goals a teacher has for a classroom.
“It’s a suite for teachers to do all the work they do behind the scenes,” Thompson said. “It enables them to create material more quickly than without an AI tool and it also allows them to create materials that are high quality. We use rubrics to grade our responses and adjust our input and model based on what the rubrics and testing show us.”
Eduaide.Ai uses standard AI models Chat GPT 4.0 and Claude 4 Sonnett with backend output testing to tailor the results for educational instruction purposes. Altering the output involves testing models against instructional rubrics and databases of learning and cognitive science research. This method allows Eduaide.Ai to achieve educationally tailored results in comparison to prompting standard Chat GPT or Claude models you might find on the internet.
Being at the forefront of AI’s implementation in the classroom has given Thompson unique perspectives on the pros and cons of the ever-changing technology. According to Thomas, among the greatest issues with large language learning models is the outsourcing of higher order thinking to a tool not necessarily capable of doing so.
“We talk about hallucinations in AI as though they’re a bug; they are more so an emergent property of a system picking out words that might be statistically relevant but inaccurate,” Thompson said. “AI is not a perfect tool, but I think we will all be using it in the future and it’s probably good to learn it now to become functional and literate with it. But outsourcing all higher order thinking is a nonstarter. It’s garbage in, garbage out, depending on how you prompt it, so you need to have good taste more than ever.”
Eventually leading to his co-founding of Eduaide.Ai, Thompson credited his strong foundation in education to his undergraduate experience at SRU.
“SRU has a great history as a teacher’s college and creating well prepared educators,” he said. “A lot of places you fly under the radar, but SRU gives you a lot of opportunities past the coursework. It also has a great network of teaching alumni.”
More information on Eduaide.Ai is available on its website. More information about SRU’s College of Education is available on the University’s website.
