Hi everyone!

AI is a relatively new phenomenon to me. I remember the first time I learned of it was about a year ago when I ran into a problem I was asking a friend about. I needed to send a message to someone I didn’t know very well, but I was going to be looking after their dog. As I was asking my friend about it, he said “Are you getting paid?”, “I’m not sure”, I replied. He suggested I ask that question but I felt it was a bit awkward and maybe intrusive – I didn’t want to sound like I was assuming, but I was curious. I remember him saying – why don’t you ask chatgpt? I was like “Huh? What is that?”, “It’s an AI online tool that you can ask questions and it’ll write it for you”. Hmm I thought, how weird. I did not take his advice at the time as I thought it was kind of ridiculous.

I have since come around to this “new” phenomenon that is ChatGPT.

I decided to start with a very basic question 😉 …

HOW CAN I USE CHATGPT AS A TEACHER? 

Take a look & see for yourself the 10 main ideas it shared:

It seems as though ChatGPT is pretty confident it can help me in many ways. Out of the 10, let’s break down 3 of my favourites a bit further.

1. Student Engagement

• Interactive Activities like quizzes and trivia
  • I LOVE the inquiry approach and giving students something to DO rather than to simply observe – this sounds like a great idea to use in my classroom.
• Creative Learning Tools like storytelling or comics
  • Having students write using their imagination and about things that are interested in is so key in having them be engaged. Many times, students will be applying cross-curricular knowledge to these topics (ex. science) without even knowing it because they are passionate about the writing.

2. Lesson Plans

• Structuring Lessons 
  • The structure of every lesson is important – knowing that students typically remember what was said first and last is also something to be mindful of.
  • When it comes to time, I have some work to do on managing it and knowing when to move forward – I tend to slow down while making sure that all students are understanding.
  • With ChatGPT, I can begin with a better structure and use timers for each part of my lesson to keep me on track and not lose the students who begin to lose interest because the lesson may be too slow for them.
• Engaging Activities
  • My favourite part of teaching is giving the students an activity to do – so they can learn whilst also having fun!
  • ChatGPT can help me “brainstorm interactive activities like group discussions, games, or project-based learning tasks, develop creative assignments, quizzes, or challenges to enhance student engagement.”
    • In the interest of ethics and also creativity, I also want to make sure I don’t become reliant on ChatGPT – it is made to ASSIST and support me – NOT to do the work FOR me.
    • Part of the reason I decided to become a teacher is because it involves a lot of creativity – it’s important that we are still using our own ideas. The internet and AI are certainly helpful TOOLS, but our lessons will be much more personal and effective if we make them OURS 🙂
• EXAMPLE: 
  • As you can see in this video, ChatGPT does a great job of laying out a template for a lesson plan according to the topic, grade, and time you have.
    • It does not provide the specific materials or resources but gives you an inspiration of how to structure it!

• Assessment Tools
  • ChatGPT can help to create rubrics for grading projects and written work that can then be edited and adjusted to fit our given assignments.
    • Here is an example for an essay:

• • It can help create questions intended for formative assessment
    • Asking questions is one of the most important ways to check for student understanding – this can be through verbal answering, written through an exit slip, or demonstrating through their activities.
    • It is important to always ask questions so the students are thinking for themselves and not learning to rely on you telling them the answer
    • Having a solid list of questions going into every lesson will make it much more effective.

3. Administrative Support

• Scheduling & Time Management: this is by far, the MOST important and helpful way for me to utilize ChatGPT.
  • Teaching includes an extremely high amount of organization in order to keep up with reminders, deadlines, constant scheduling and re-scheduling, maintaining efficiency, creating timetables.
  • ChatGPT can help me keep organized by allotting appropriate time windows to each task.
    • One of the I (and many others I know) struggle with is …. procrastination. AKA – needing a deadline in order to have the motivation to get something done. When the urgency is low, I either won’t complete something until I absolutely have to or I will spend way too long on something that should take a tenth of the time it needs to 😂.
    • This way, you can keep your days as consistent as possible so I have time at work and also time for myself & a social life!
  • SOLUTION: CHATGPT + GOOGLE CALENDAR
    • ASK CHATGPT to organize my week every Sunday to set my week up for success
    • INPUT the schedule into Google Calendar
      • This is the KEY to having a balanced life.
      • Google Calendar allows you to:
        • Manage and Create your schedule
        • Collaborate and Share with others
          • Integrates with all other Google apps and other third-party apps like Zoom and Slack
        • Turn on notifications and alerts
          • Reminds you of an event at the time you request
        • Create separate calendars for work and personal events
          • Colour coding to visually categorize events
        • Task & Goal Management
          • Add tasks and to-do lists and mark complete
        • Accessibility
          • Sync events across all your devices

As we can see, ChatGPT provides many ways to enhance our classroom experiences by making them more engaging, helping us plan them out, and eliminating a lot of the more administrative tasks freeing up time to focus on other tasks that require our full attention and cannot be completed through AI!

Supporting Different Learning Styles:

I decided to go ahead & ask ChatGPT how we can support ALL of our students by incorporating different learning styles?

It provided a breakdown of each type of learner and the activities/assignments that correlate with each type! Have a watch 🙂

• This is one of the most important things I have learned throughout my classroom experience
  • Every student is so unique and it’s important that we give our students an opportunity to complete assignments and activities to showcase their skills in the best way!

ChatGPT is a really exciting and wonderful tool that welcomes so much more creativity, connection and contingency to the lives of teachers and our students!