Quick resources at the touch of button. An inch wide, but a mile deep.
Community Review for Diffit
My Take
What I loved about this application is that the resources are plainly listed and accessible for classroom use and teacher vetting. The nature of the application itself is very specific but heavily purposeful as long as the teacher's needs can fit into the 'inch wide, mile deep' platform.
If Diffit wants to separate itself from the rest and be a 'go-to' in a teacher's life, it should expand its capabilities to accept larger prompts and more general, class-wide activities. As such, Diffit requires an educator to be strong in pedagogy in the same way a toolbox needs a mechanic that knows how to use it.
How I Use It
Diffit is a tool that, with the power of AI, can generate a decipherable, translatable body of text from reliable sources. The sources utilized by Diffit are accessible to educators for vetting and crediting, and can also be implemented directly into classroom learning. However, Diffit truly shines when utilized on an as-necessary basis for select students, and here's why:
Diffit, as mentioned previously, can generate easily-decipherable bodies of text on a unit of student or more specifically, a prompt or essential question. These can come directly from your already created lesson plans and assessments, and in my case, I fed Diffit the following prompt: "Why did the United States enter World War Two so late?" The application gave me a beautifully accurate response of five paragraphs length in under five seconds total. This can be useful to ESL students who could use a personalized 'snapshot' of a concept, especially considering Diffit's translation abilities.
Where Diffit truly shines is that it takes these resources which you, the educator, can vet, and generates classroom materials that can be for individual learners or at the general level. Using the aforementioned prompt, I was able to craft a "3-2-1 Reading Comprehension" Graphic Organizer; something I chose out of seemingly hundreds of other options. For dense social studies units or students who could use assistance in note-taking, Diffit can be incredibly powerful to scaffold your students towards content mastery.
Not to mention, Diffit creates simple assessments and extracts from your prompts key terms, concepts, and provides some basic questions pertaining to your input. While these are useful, I find that they simply give teachers the 'legos' with which to build their elaborate lesson plans, interventions, and differentiated materials. This app is best used when hyper-focused on specific concepts or student needs, and in my opinion should not be utilized as a means to create larger pictures of academic portraits like unit planning (that's where a competitor like Magicschool.ai can come in handy!).
However, the name itself, "Diffit," seems to imply that when you have a student who needs some differentiating, you have a toolbox in "Diffit."