Make your life easier Let ChatGPT be your Teaching Assistant
Hello teachers, you might not be aware of this but there are multiple ways you as a teacher can use ChatGPT to your advantage. Think of creating educational materials that can enahnce your students way of learning or perhaps, preparing assessment tasks that could help determine what your students strengths and weaknesses are? That’s two key advantages to using this advaned artificial intelligence (ai) tool, but there are plenty of other ways too! We will discuss them in this article. Let’s face it if you are a teacher you should be using ChatGPT.
Apparently according to a research paper back in March 2023, 51% of teachers are already using ChatGPT. So what’s your excuse? This key piece of information is clearly showing that more people are adopting the use of AI within their work. This could help revolutionize the way teaching and learning works in the future. Why not be at the front of this growth?
So as we navigate this exciting new era of AI, now is the time for teachers to rise up to this amazing opportunity and place yourself within the world of AI. So you can realise the full potential and possibilities ChatGPT has to offer you. We can show you some creative ways to use this chatbot tool, it’s not just for your students to create bog standard essays, it has many other uses too.
This article is all about Teachers and that all Teachers should be using ChatGPT to improve their work flow. Why work harder when you can work smarts? So come with us while we explore this topic.
Start at the Beginning – Brainstorm Ideas
Ok let’s not beat around the bush here. Brainstorming is one of the main pillars of teaching. It helps fuel the imagination and turn basic ideas into something more bigger. This is where we are going to unlock the power of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is a great idea generator and can provide dozens examples of any given topic. So no matter what you are stuggling with, why not ask ChatGPT to give you some kind of assistance. Whether this is for help or to just expand on your class. Let this AI tool help you out.
Please be aware that ChatGPT heavily relies on what is known as a prompt, this is where prompt engineering comes in handy. Don’t worry about that too much as we are going to show you some examples of our prompts. Feel free to edit and “spice” these up a bit to get the response you are looking for.
Here is a quick example on how you can use brainstorming. You want to teach a class on thee study of volcanos but you are struggling to keep the attention of your students. Well let’s ask ChatGPT wat it thinks about this:
Prompt: “Topic: Geography the study of Volcanos “For the above-mentioned topic, brainstorm modern teaching ways to keep the class more active so they don’t get bored or easily distracted“”
Here is the response that ChatGPT replied with:
Look at the list above. These examples are giving both the Teacher and the student roles. Some of these ideas might not be familiar to some people or be relevant in the traditional sense of schooling. But they do come up with some interactive ways of teaching. Please note that ChatGPT gives us 10 examples we only showed the top 5.
This is one example of using a simple prompt to get a response from ChatGPT we go more in depth in regards to prompt in this article here. It aims to help you improve the content ChatGPT provides the user.
Make Life Easier By Creating Drafts
Ah yes the lesson plans. Weather you love or hate them they are an important responsibility for your day to day life as a treachery. Issue is they can be a bit of a challenge to create. You have to keep coming up with new ideas and ways to engage with your students. Let’s face it this can be a time consuming job and it times offers very little reward, especially if your student don’t like the lessons you’re teaching.
This is where we ask again for the assistance of ChatGPT. You can now use this AI tool as a personal assitant it get i to draft up the initial ideas. Take the ideas ChatGPT creates and bin the ones you don’t lile. We are not getting this program to organise our day to day lives to a tea. We are getting it to create a base draft layout so we can ad to it. This why you are not wasting all your time and could be using it somewhere more proactive.
You could be lazy and get AI to create the whole thing for you, but where would the fun be in that? Here is an example of a prompt trying to get chatGPT to create a draft lesson plan:
Prompt: “Create a lesson plan for Grade 9 students about the human body“
Here is a screen shot of the response ChatGPT came up with. If you want to read the full thing you can check that out here. Quite extensive right? It’s got everything that would be required of a draft lesson setup, times and all.
Now we need to make you aware of ChatGPT and it’s tendency to hallucinate at anytime. It can claim some made up things as facts so you need to ensure that you double check the content it has provided you with. But since you are a teacher I’m sure you are well aware of what might be true or false.
Also ChatGPT isn’t the best with time, some of these sections might take longer or be shorter than expected. This is why we tell you that ChatGPT can create a “draft”. It should save you time in the long run.
Learn to Simplify
Let’s face it some parts of education can be daunting especially when you are teaching to a younger audience. Some topics are quite advanced and sometimes it might be hard for you to figure out a way to simplify things.
This is again where ChatGPT comes into play. It is quite good at simplifying complicated topics. After all we want our message to be easily absorbed by our students so they can put the work and effort in, in order to thrive in the future. We don’t want them to spend most of their time lost and confused in regards to what we are talking about. Sure some kids zone out, but let’s make it this a little easier for them with simplification.
Here is an example of who you would write a prompt for ChatGPT:
- Topic: The topic you are wanting to write about
- For Audience: The audience you are targeting, age range etc
- Content Goal: How do you want your message to be given.
- Writing style: Leave notes on how you want your words to come across.
Here is an example filled in for you:
I need you to write a class for me using the following information
Topic: Gravity
For Audience: Grade 4 Students
Content Goal: Explain the topic to the audience in a simplified way
Writing Style: Clear and descriptive for the age range
As you can see ChatGPT has given us a response with the basic outlines of our class. The important thing to note with this prompt is you are telling this AI tool what kind of output you want. It knows the target audience, the topic, the end goal and even the writing style. This helps it create content suitable for that age range. Just remember as we mentioned before double check it’s information. Learn how to use ChatGPT correctly.
If you still require more information on a given section you can ask it to elaborate on that sections. For example we can ask “Elaborate on I”
It will then give us more information on the given section. Please note that although you can do this all on the free version of ChatGPT, if you are using this AI tool often it might be in your best interest to look at the paid version ChatGPT Plus. It does have some benefits over the free version.
Provide Examples For Your Students
If you are struggling to create more easy to understand examples for your students, then why not let ChatGPT create them for you. We already have seen how good it is at shimmying things, why not ask it to give you some examples!
Just remember to let ChatGPT know the age range of your class and what topic you would like examples for:
“I am teaching a class of science for 8 year old students. I need to teach them about Photosynthesis can you give me 5 examples of this?”
It’s best to think of AI like an idea generator. It can give you some amazing information that might just trigger something inside of you to create more. We have been using ChatGPT for the past few months and find it a great tool to aid users when creating content. It also can help relive writers block.
So why not give it a try, you don’t need to use all of it’s examples but it might help when you are stuck and need a little extra push to create more ideas for your lessons.
These are just a few of the things ChatGPT is capable of doing. It can do so much more. You can even use it to create presentations, have it plan quizzes, assignments, and projects too! The list is endless, your only limit is your own imagination.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that ChatGPT is having a direct effect on the way we work. It has transformed countless industries and business in the small amount of time it has been around. Weather this is a good or bad thing only time will tell.
Use of these advanced AI tools can surely help teachers ease the stress of there day to day lives. This is through the use of it being a personal assistant. But there are alot of concerns around the use of this technology one of those concerns is of course plagurism. We have wrote a section all about AI content detectors that all teachers should be made aware of.
The world is ever changing and new technology is being created every day. We all need to learn to adapt evolve and implement these new technologies into our daily lives if we want to thrive. But as we have said countless times. This type of technology should only aid or enhance our lives not take over them.
So what do you feel about teachers using AI good for bad? we would love to read your comments, why not leave one below!
