How can AI move beyond lesson preparation and become part of the actual classroom experience, encouraging students to interact, participate, and create?
On August 27, Xiulang Elementary School in New Taipei City held a whole-school summer professional development workshop for more than 200 teachers. The school invited Teacher Lin Fang-Chuan, also known as "Teacher Tomato," from Dazhu Elementary School in Taoyuan City, to lead a hands-on session titled "From Interaction to Creation: HiTeach × AI-Empowered Smart Classrooms."
Starting with classroom interaction, the workshop guided teachers step by step toward practical applications of AI, smart teaching, and gamified learning.
With such a large number of participants, the school arranged four separate workshop venues, allowing teachers from different grades and subject areas to participate in rotating sessions. Even during the summer preparation period, teachers came equipped with tablets and laptops and actively followed each step of the hands-on activities.
Rather than simply learning new functions, participants were encouraged to consider a more practical question: how can technology be brought back into their own classrooms and support real teaching needs?
Teacher Lin began with HiTeach classroom interaction tools and invited participants to reconsider a fundamental question: What is the purpose of classroom interaction?
Smart teaching is not simply about moving paper-based questions onto student devices, nor is it about increasing the number of times students click a button or submit an answer.
Through real-time questioning, student responses, answer visualization, and immediate learning feedback, teachers can more quickly make student learning visible. They can identify how well students understand a concept at that moment and adjust the next teaching move based on what is actually happening in the classroom.
When classroom interaction provides teachers with meaningful learning information in real time, technology becomes more than a way to make lessons lively. It becomes a tool for instructional decision-making and active student participation.
Another major focus of the workshop was moving AI beyond content generation and using it to help teachers create learning activities.
Teacher Lin first asked participants to begin with their own instructional needs: What grade do I teach? What do I want students to learn? What topic fits the lesson? What kind of game mechanism would support that learning goal?
Teachers then worked with AI to organize and develop their ideas before moving into HiTeach Cloud Board Games to build an actual classroom activity.
The workshop did not stop at a feature demonstration. Every teacher created a Cloud Board Game that could be brought back and used in a real lesson.
From signing in and duplicating sample resources to creating a game and customizing questions and answers, teachers followed the full process step by step. Their own subject content was gradually transformed into an interactive learning game that students could actually join and play.
In this way, an abstract idea of "using AI in education" became a concrete teaching resource ready for classroom use.
HiTeach Cloud Board Games provide multiple game mechanisms that allow teachers to turn subject content into customized learning activities without writing code.
Challenges, competitions, matching activities, and scenario-based tasks can transform conventional practice into a more engaging learning experience. More importantly, Cloud Board Games are not limited to fixed question banks or preset answers.
Teachers can first collaborate with AI to generate questions and learning content, then revise the results according to student ability, curriculum materials, and specific learning objectives. Questions and answers can be customized before the activity is published for students.
Students can then connect directly to the activity, while teachers can review participation results and leaderboard information to better understand how students are engaging with the task.
AI does not replace the teacher's role in designing learning. Instead, it lowers the barrier to content creation and speeds up the development of teaching materials.
The teacher still makes the most important decisions: what students need to learn, how they should learn it, and which activity best supports that goal.
The value of a digital teaching workshop is not measured by how many functions teachers hear about. What matters is whether they can take at least one practical method from the workshop and use it in their own classroom.
This was one of the most meaningful aspects of Xiulang Elementary School's whole-school professional development program.
When more than 200 teachers learn and create together, technology is no longer limited to a small group of ICT coordinators or digital learning leaders. It becomes a practical teaching approach that can be used across grades and subject areas.
From interaction to creation, and from using digital tools to designing meaningful learning experiences, this HiTeach × AI workshop opened new possibilities for gamified learning and active student participation in the new semester.
Explore the latest HiTeach features, including Cloud Board Games, the AI Learning Companion, Cloud Mind Maps, and the HiTeach Triathlon Contest, or visit the HiTeach Portal to access cloud-based learning resources.