Oh ChatGPT… What is the bane of some teachers, is one of my favourite websites to use as an educator. When AI first starting hitting the more public market and people were using it more widespread, I wasn’t actually on board. My husband played around with it and enjoyed using it, but I didn’t see how it would be useful to me as a teacher. It wasn’t until two years, when I realized that maybe it could be used as a teacher after all. And if you read my previous blog about how I used AI for beading, it can really be helpful!
The reason I first decided to try AI as a teacher was because I needed to make a powerpoint on horticulture and caring for plants. Now I know all the information, but I didn’t want to spend the time putting all the information down in my own words and such. So I decided that it would be a good test about the abilities of AI. AI blew it out of the water! It took me less than 10 minutes to have a powerpoint completed with images and all the information for the lesson. This was really the turning point for me as a teacher who used AI.
Now that I have learned how AI can be helpful to teachers, I use it fairly regularly to help me with creating worksheets for outcomes, writing end of year letters that I give to each student, and my favourite part: helping me write report cards. Now you might be thinking “how can AI write a report card for a student that they don’t know?” Let me tell you, it is surprisingly easy. Often my biggest struggle with writing report card comments is that I know the three or four comments that I want to make about a student, but I don’t know how to put it in a professional sounding comment. This is where ChatGPT shines.
For example if I was writing a report card comment for a student for their FASA (behavioural) section of their report card, I might feed it this prompt:
“Write a 3-4 sentence report card comment for a student who is friendly and respectful to other students and staff, involved in school sports but struggles with getting academic work done on time and is disorganized.”
ChatGPT responds with:
[Student’s Name] is a friendly and respectful member of our school community who fosters positive relationships with peers and staff. Their enthusiasm for school sports is commendable, and they bring great energy to team activities. However, [Student’s Name] struggles with staying organized and completing academic assignments on time, which impacts their overall performance. With consistent effort to improve time management and organizational skills, they have the potential to achieve greater academic success.
Now this might be slightly tuned to how I would like the comment to be written due to the fact that I have used this the last two years when writing report cards, but if I didn’t like the answer, the easy part is that I can just ask for it to generate another answer and even ask for it to change specific parts of the answer.
Now this isn’t obviously the only thing that ChatGPT can do, but I think it is one area where it can shine because of the large amount of report cards teachers are expected to write every day. One other way that I have used it was to modify the assignment to be at an easier level for students in modified programming. It can be very useful for helping plan for students. I am looking forward to see how AI is used in education in the coming years, because I am truly on the side that this is a great tool and should be used more often!
Hi Briana,
I loved how honest you were with why you use ChatGPT. I absolutely love ChatGPT and honestly don’t remember what I would have done without it. ChatGPT can take alot of the grunt work out of things and make our lives easier.
Hi Briana,
I think that ChatGPT can be super useful for report card comments, its nice to sometimes have another way of seeing how you can put things. I never realized how useful it can be to make classroom resources too, I haven’t dabbled much in ChatGPT but think it would be useful for me to start.
Hi Briana! I feel the same way about ChatGPT in the classroom. I used it in many of the same ways as you while doing my internship and I LOVED it. It made so many of my tasks a lot easier and was able to free up more of my time outside of school. On the other hand though, my students also loved it – but more so to complete their assignments for them. I think it’s really important that we’re able to teach students what it can do, but also how to use it responsibly so that they’re still learning.
As someone who is currently teaching, do you have any tips on how to find that balance?
Hi Brynn, I think that that is honestly a big concern. I will be honest in saying that the group of kids that I am working with often do not have technology access at home, so even if I am working with middle years and high school students, I don’t have to deal with this concern. I have seen one student using AI to ask about what a definition meant in class for Math and other than that, AI hasn’t really been a concern yet for my students. Since they aren’t using AI regularly, I don’t often talk about AI except in passing. Which probably isn’t the best practice, but it is what works for me so far. I just don’t want to put the idea of using AI to cheat into their heads.
I honestly love GPT. My favourite prompt is, “Can you fix this please?” It can fix anything I’ve written—improving grammar, correcting punctuation, and rephrasing sentences for clarity. It’s like Grammarly on steroids, and best of all, it’s completely free!
Beyond that, it’s incredibly useful for working on lesson plans or expanding on ideas. I like to think of it as a professor in my pocket.
Have a good one, and thanks for the great read!
Rob