Intersection of education and deep learning method of artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually becoming a hot research field. Education will be profoundly transformed by AI. The purpose of this review is to help education practitioners understand the research frontiers and directions of AI applications in education. This paper reviews the applications of deep learning in education and provides a visualized bibliometric analysis. The data of this paper come from Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) and Web-of-Science (WOS). These two data bases are searched to identify research of deep learning-based education applications from 2015 to 2023. CiteSpace is used to analyze the number of publications, authors, institutions, and keywords of articles that are related to deep learning and education. This paper reviews and systematically analyzes the educational applications of deep learning in the following six aspects: learning effect prediction, educational game, learning recommendation, automatic scoring, assisted teaching and medical education. Based on the visualized bibliometric analysis, the path and inflection point of research evolution can be inferred, the potential motivation of research can be analyzed, and the frontier of research can be explored. At present, AI can enable teachers to focus more on teaching and personalized interactions with students, enhancing rather than replacing human instructions.