Spearheaded by Edtech Insiders — a company that produces a podcast, newsletter and other resources for the ed-tech community — a new generative AI map and database categorize more than 250 AI-enabled tools into use cases for teaching and learning, according to a recent news release. The map’s use-case categories are instructional materials, assessment and feedback, teacher practice support, teacher professional learning, student support, and social tools. Within each are more specific use cases, such as lesson plan generation and homework help.
The map shows logos of the ed-tech companies with the “largest reach” for each use case, based on company size and web traffic, according to the map’s methodology page. Above the map are links to the use-case database and an AI tool company directory. The database contains a full list of AI-driven ed-tech tools identified to support each use case, and a searchable directory provides information on the companies that created these tools.
The map only features tools that are publicly launched, currently available and focused on K-12 education, according to Alex Sarlin, co-founder of Edtech Insiders and part of the team that built it. He added that the inclusion of a tool does not mean it has been proven to be effective.
The map, database and directory are an expansion of earlier work by Laurence Holt and Jacob Klein, ed-tech veterans who created a map of AI in education in 2023 to make sense of the sudden outpouring of AI-enabled tools for teaching and learning, according to Holt, who is a senior adviser at the nonprofit XQ Institute. Klein is head of product at TeachFX, a company that provides AI-powered instructional coaching for teachers.
“We were just sort of trying to make sense of it and thought, as we started to do that, that it might be useful for other people, too,” Holt said. “So the original target was ourselves, and after that, it was other people thinking about innovation.”
The duo posted the map on Medium in June 2023, where Holt said it quickly gained traction. He and Klein began receiving inquiries not only from other ed-tech developers but also philanthropic funders and educators themselves, as the map laid bare the gluts and gaps in AI for education. For example, when the original map was created, there were already a number of AI tools available for tasks such as tutoring and question generation, but few or none in areas such as grading and student data analysis.
After updating the map on Medium in March 2024, Holt said he and Klein realized the project would require frequent updates from a team of people devoted to keeping tabs on this fast-paced field.
“Jacob and I were really looking for a home for the map,” Holt said. “It had outgrown us, and yet we knew because of the calls and the emails we got that people were sort of beginning to depend on it, in a few different sectors.”
The pair called on Sarlin and Ben Kornell, the co-founders of Edtech Insiders, to help transition the map to their own website, where they were already tracking AI-enabled ed-tech tools in a database directory.
“Laurence and Jacob had done this amazing use-case analysis, and we had, in parallel, been doing a database of AI tools, just trying to make sense of this fast-moving space,” Sarlin said. “And so, we were like, not only can we be a great support for the use-case taxonomy, but we can introduce a whole lot more companies into it, and we can sort of use it as a searchable database to actually go deep into any one of the use cases and put them together.”
The number of AI tools featured in the new map more than doubled to a total of 269, and Sarlin said he expects another 100 will be added in the coming months. As far as any new gluts and gaps, the database currently lists 92 AI tools for student support, 78 for instructional materials, 46 for teacher practice support, 38 for assessment and feedback, 10 for teacher professional development and five for social purposes.
