Is the bad AI guy THAT bad for your digital classroom?

 

 

So it seems that everybody is talking about ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by Openai that is capable of answering pretty much anything you ask! And ….. there are some strong opinions about the guy.

 

 

As  with anything new, the fear of the unknown seems to take over and as humans, what we seem to do is to find all the possible obstacles to deal with new situations (and, yes…I am generalising here).

Going back to when the pandemic started and us teachers had to instantly switch to the online game, how many of us truly thought that actually, there are some interesting possibilities here? I don’t think many. And yet now we talk about how the online learning environment can provide students with so many enriching learning experiences. And how it has the power to strengthen face2face classroom interactions as well.

 

 

 

 

But it also presents some great opportunities for students

 

- language translation

- personalised learning

- help with generating revision materials

- help with generating prompts for research projects

- help with generating ideas to start the writing process

- access to information when/where teachers are not available

and many more!

 

Not to mention for teachers!

 

As a quick example I asked ChatGPT to write an essay on the environmental impact of urbanisation in Japan. Imagine my current Academic English unit was looking at Urbanisation and as part of this unit students were asked to write an essay and deliver a short presentation.

 

From this fast generated essay, I could get students to work on, for example:

 

- identifying main ideas and topic sentences

- looking at paragraph structure

- identify academic words from the academic word list

 

 

I then asked Chat GPT to identify all the academic words that are part of the AWL ⬇️

 

 

And also to create a fill in the gap exercise leaving blank some of the AWL words. It generated the exercise and the answers!

 

 

 

COULD THE SPEED IN CREATING THIS TYPE OF TASKS FOR YOUR CLASS BE WORTH IT?

 

COULD IT HELP NEWLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS BUILD SOME CONFIDENCE IN DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE ACTIVITIES? OR CUT DOWN THEIR PLANNING TIME CONSIDERABLY?

 

 

 

I can clearly see a benefit of using this type of AI tool with students to build vocabulary lists,  generate examples of use in different contexts, summarise a lecture or a TeDTalk or create a quiz for content revision….

 

So my vote is for the careful and informed use of it in the digital classroom by students and teachers as  another tool to aid student engagement in the blended, hybrid and fully asynchronous classroom. It is important that students and teachers understand how to use it and when to best make use of it.

 

ChatGPT and similar AI tools have the potential of being powerful tools for teaching and learning.

 

 

I've curated some content here on the possible benefits of using ChatGPT/ AI tools in the classroom. Scan the QR code to get you there or click on the link here.

 

 

 

So...

 

 Love it or Hate it?

 

Would you use ChatGPT in your digital classroom? Or are you already using it?