by Victoria Berasaluce Guerra (LTL Contributor)

Incorporating AI into the classroom has never been easier with Mizou, a powerful tool that allows educators to create personalized chatbots for student practice in a target language or subject of choice. By tailoring AI interactions, teachers can ensure that students engage in meaningful, guided conversations based on custom prompts they design.

Getting Started with Mizou

When signing in to Mizou, you can select your role as a teacher to receive personalized feedback and content that aligns with your curriculum. Mizou supports various educational frameworks, including:
✅ AP
✅ IB
✅ Common Core
✅ IGCSE, and more.

This customization ensures that chatbots align with your specific learning objectives and classroom needs.

Creating a Chatbot: Custom vs. AI-Generated

Mizou offers two chatbot creation options:

🔹 Custom Chatbots – You write the prompt from scratch, allowing for full control over the chatbot’s responses.
🔹 AI-Generated Chatbots – Mizou generates the chatbot’s prompt based on your learning objectives, which you can refine and tweak for better accuracy.

Regardless of the option you choose, teacher input is crucial to fine-tune the chatbot’s instructions, ensuring the conversation stays on track.

A screenshot of a chat

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

When selecting “Custom”, you will work within a split-screen interface:
➡️ One side lets you adjust the chatbot’s instructions.
➡️ The other side allows you to test and refine the chatbot in real time.

Why Choose Mizou Over ChatGPT for Your Classroom?

Unlike ChatGPT, Mizou offers enhanced teacher control over chatbot interactions. With Mizou, you can:

✅ Set a title for the activity.
✅ Define AI instructions to shape the conversation.
✅ Choose a grade level for age-appropriate responses.
✅ Customize the chatbot’s name and avatar for a more engaging experience.
✅ Establish rules to guide student interactions.
✅ Add a welcome message and audio to introduce the chatbot.
✅ Upload a knowledge file to ensure the chatbot focuses on specific content.

Mizou also offers access to a community of educator-created chatbots, allowing you to explore and adapt existing resources.

Creative Ways to Use Mizou in the Classroom

Here are some exciting ways to integrate Mizou into your lessons:

🎭 Role-Playing Interviews – Have students interact with historical figures or fictional characters.
🗣 Debates & Discussions – Students can debate global challenges (e.g., AP curriculum topics) with an AI character designed by you.
📖 Language Practice – Mizou can help students practice conversations in a target language, following teacher-set guidelines.
📊 Assessment & Feedback – Teachers can review student chatbot sessions, track conversation length, and even use AI-assisted grading based on rubrics.

💡 Pro Tip: Always review and tweak chatbot prompts to ensure they align with your learning goals!

Enhance Your AI Skills with Mizou AIcademy

To maximize the potential of Mizou, teachers can enroll in Mizou AIcademy, an online certification program that covers:

✅ Prompt engineering for effective chatbot creation.
✅ Best practices for ethical AI use in education.By becoming Mizou-certified, you can confidently integrate AI into your teaching while ensuring meaningful and responsible student engagement.

by Victoria Berasaluce Guerra (LTL Contributor)

Whenever we start a technology unit or lesson in my class, AI is brought to the forefront of the conversation as an example. Students are not sure how to feel about it. They express it is helpful but will make people lazy and that it someday might take a lot of jobs off the market. Their concerns are valid. As educators, we cannot ignore the presence of AI in our contemporary world. Like teaching how to browse for online information and assess sources, how to use AI and what to be aware of is going to become one of the skills for the 21^st century. We have a responsibility to help our students develop critical thinking skills regarding this area of technology.

How do I get Started?

One of the ways you can start or deepen the conversation around AI is with a movement activity, such as the Likert scale. In this activity, students will hear a question and move across an imaginary line to show their positions between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”, or a scale from 1 to 10.

The first questions are guided towards ethics and “how bad is AI?”. The last questions are geared towards “have you ever used AI?”. After students take positions, the teacher guides the discussion around the students’ answers. Students start smiling when some of them don’t want to give away if they have used it for homework or essays.

When using AI in your classroom, remember that it is imperative to discuss how AI works, the advantages and disadvantages. In the next section, I am going to focus on some of the ways you can implement AI to engage students and enhance your teaching experience.

Some AI tools to try out

Mizou

If you have used Chat GPT to make your students chat with a bot using their language skills, Mizou is a more accurate and personalized way to do that. It basically let’s teachers create and customize AI chatbots for 1-1 student interactions. It does require skills at writing specific prompts that will guide the chatbot and not let them go into “hallucination” mode (when the bot starts getting confused or deviates from the prompt). A nice feature is that you can include your rubrics or lesson materials for the chatbot to consider when responding and even grading.

Suno

Is an amazing tool to create music based on styles, prompts and vocabulary you choose. Warning: you might get some of your musician students to feel “cringey”. However, Suno is unbelievable to refresh your lessons. I never tell my students who the artist is when I first play a song, I let them guess the artist only to reveal to them later that it is AI-generated. I can assure you I’ve seen many mouths drop with this tool. No matter the lesson or level of your students, you can customize a song based on your lesson needs and tackle new vocabulary and tenses in a new way. No more scrolling the internet or Spotify to find that perfect song that will fit your lesson, although if you do, that’s great also!

Diffit and QuestionWell

Diffit and QuestionWell platforms allow you to use existing curriculum or generate content, including assessments and different templates for student activities. Teachers can customize the results to make them specific to their grade level, the lesson and language. Some of the outcomes for Diffit for example include fiction, non-fiction, images, summaries and key vocabulary. You can even make the information customized to be based on real, cited sources.

Khanmigo and Magic School AI

Khanmigo and Magic School AI all-encompassing websites are the closest thing you will get to a teacher’s personal assistant. And we all need one, right? Explore AI-generated rubrics, lesson plans, classroom newsletters, exit tickets and even teacher jokes! One of the great assets of these platforms is that it saves teachers’ valuable time. Think about always reviewing and editing the materials before use.

AI enlightenment

The AI universe will continue evolving and expanding. If we want to foster AI literacy in our classes, we need to become AI enlightened educators and help our students analyze the implications of using AI. Teachers should prepare to acquire the necessary skills to grow their practice and knowledge around AI to engage students by teaching them about and with twenty-first-century instruments.

To be continued…

Follow our upcoming LTL in the next months for actionable strategies on how to apply these AI tools. I will demonstrate with specific examples and considerations, how to integrate these resources into your curriculum to transform your practice. You will never look back!

mizou

Mizou: Making Chatbot Experiences Better for our Classrooms