Ideas for AI in the classroom - Supporting Educator Workload

As I write this post, schools in NYC are going to be blocked from using ChatGPT (NBC News). Without knowing the details about what they are actually blocking and how it strikes me as being very short-sighted.

1) Students do not only learn facts and concepts, but they also learn how to interact with the world. I cannot see AI going anywhere, so students will be at a disadvantage to students around the world who will be taught how to use it.

2) Students will still be able to access AI at home - so it doesn't address the cheating concerns.

3) AI is available through a heck of a lot of tools, including the excellent search engine you.com , and the AI tool Moonbeam. I suspect Microsoft with Edge and Bing will incorporate AI in the near future and Google must be looking at its own search engine. Are they all going to be banned?

4) AI is very useful for students, but it is also incredibly useful for educators, too.  

If ChatGPT does get banned in NYC, I hope educators there can still find a way to use some of the excellent ideas for AI to support their professional role. This is what this week's article is all about- leveraging AI to support being a teacher. As with the last post on using AI text generators with students, there is some crossover, but I aim to focus on reducing the workload of being a teacher.

Lesson Planning

One of the first things that will come to mind of teachers is whether it can help in lesson planning. Now most experienced teachers won't need to do this. Experienced teachers may find the lesson plans produced by AI, such as ChatGPT, very rudimentary. They also are likely to be already confident in a lesson.

But, for less experienced teachers - or someone who needs to create a new lesson plan quickly - this may be a very useful time saver. For example, I can get ChatGPT to create a 55 min lesson on Light and reflection in under a minute:

I've been teaching 28 years, and this is a perfectly acceptable lesson. I would definitely make changes (relevant to my learners), but for a beginning teacher, this has saved a lot of time. As always, going through the lesson is important, as AI is an unreliable narrator. [There again, there are a lot of unreliable resources created online by humans]

There are better AI tools that can develop lessons that better fit a teacher's style - as well as the prior knowledge that a class may have. The best tool I have come across for this is Moonbeam - which educators can sign up for at a discounted fee.

Moonbeam is an awesome tool as it enables refinement of the end product along the way. This means that you are far more likely to get a lesson plan that is more detailed and represents you and your teaching style/ethos more accurately.

I'll write a post on Moonbeam specifically in a later post, but in the meantime here are some screenshots to show how it works:

Having selected Educator I get a large number of different templates - three are shown below:

Selecting Lesson Plan brings us to:

It's here that you can see the power of Moonbeam. You enter the lesson title and the target audience. You also add keywords and phrases that you would like to see in the response. It will then create a lesson outline based on your suggestions. The outline it generates is editable if it hasn't gone the way you want it to. Eventually, a full lesson plan, with explanations about why each part is undertaken, is created. This, too, is editable and changeable with AI! Subscribers to my newsletter can see the full lesson plan, but for those looking at this on the web, here is a snapshot:

One thing I would add about AI lesson planning. Sometimes it generates new ways to teach the lesson. So if you are looking for new ideas, it may be more useful for experienced teachers than you may have first thought!

Schemes of Work

Although some of us may no longer use lesson plans, schemes of work (the description of the route learning will follow in a unit) are more likely to be needed. AI can assist with this too. As with lesson planning, you can use AI to create a plan for a unit.

In this case, I used ChatGPT with the phrase:

I am going to be teaching a unit on light with a class of year 9 students. They need to understand what light is, reflection, refraction, internal refraction, wavelength, frequency, amplitude, colour, how different colours combine etc. The unit should last approximately forty 55 min lessons and use assessment for learning strategies along the way. Please design a scheme of work for this unit.

This is a perfectly acceptable scheme of work. Note, although there are ten lessons, these do not mean a single 55 min lesson. I would spend enough time on each to ensure that my students had learned the lesson. I would also then ask more detailed questions to the AI if I wanted to follow certain learning science theories or models.

It is not as elegant as the lesson planning, but again it would save time planning.

Report writing

AI is excellent for this. AI can write short three-line reports, all the way to full-page reports. Obviously, we need to ensure that a report is specific to a learner. However, there are plenty of times when either teachers have been given a comment bank, or they have redrafted the same report for another student. By giving some examples of the style of report needed, you can generate a large number of unique reports to fit the learners in your class. This is another timesaver for teachers.

Oh - I also was able to produce a report written in simplified Chinese for the parents of one of my students as they did not speak English.

Faculty / Department Writing

I have worked with a number of teachers who are experts at teaching but are not very good with spelling, punctuation and grammar. Thus, when it comes to things like updating website content, making newsletters for parents or writing option subject choice information, this can be a minefield. It can also destroy confidence in a teacher (in the same way it can with our students - tech is there to help, people!)

Grammarly is already a tool that people can use, but it is expensive. AI can rewrite teacher writing into a more readable, SPG-friendly form. So content can be made more interesting and accurate, improving engagement with readers.

It can also potentially help analyse department data when writing reports to management, although you do need to be careful here with sharing confidential data.

In last week's post I showed how AI text generators could look for bias or write in a certain voice. The same technique can be used for staff emails and letters. We all know someone who does not seem to be able to write 'pleasant' emails. You can now put them through Moonbeam or ChatGPT and get it to rewrite parts that come across as abrupt, threatening etc.

AI Image Generation

As mentioned in my post on AI Image generation, AI can be used to support the creation of resources for student use. In the past, some educators have used copyrighted images - which is not a good idea. Using images with a creative commons license is good, but if you're like me, what you are looking for doesn't tend to have a creative commons license. You could buy an Envato Elements license (I have one myself) which comes with access to royalty-free photos or you could use Dalle-2 to generate images that fit your needs.

Here I have asked Dalle-2 for An epiphyte growing on a tree, photorealistic, 4k

Note- Dalle-2 is free for a small number of images each month. It is not great for scientific diagrams or illustrations. MidJourney produces higher-quality images but has a cost each month. The image below was of two robot teachers helping each other, used for this blog post:

Professional Learning and Development

I think AI will have a huge impact on learning, not only with students but with educators themselves. In my school, I lead innovative learning. That means I also teach educators to use different ways to teach. There are already a lot of resources available for educators to solve problems with IT or to learn something connected with their subject. AI will enable, as with students, point-of-need, just-in-time support.

AI will have a huge impact on learning, not only with students but with educators themselves.

For example, I wanted to find some ice-breaker activities to use in my new form class. This is what I got from Moonbeam's chat - called Luna - when I asked it:

Can you suggest for me six activities that I could use in a new school class to get the new students to know each other? Explain why the suggested technique would be useful and what I would need to run it.

There are plenty of other questions relating to education or using software or equipment that can be answered well, with ideas on how to implement them.

Note - at the time of writing, I would not trust any references given by ChatGPT, Moonbeam's Luna, or You.com. All three created references that looked right, but they did not exist in reality.

Instead, for PLD that required research, I looked up the most impactful findings in the learning sciences on pedagogy using the AI tool Elicit  

So, for PLD, where you need clear evidence to support its use, use Elicit.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways that educators can leverage AI in their day-to-day professional routines. There are others, of course, and you can be sure I will be back with some more once I have tried them out.

I hope you find some of these useful and can save valuable time - reducing your non-valuable tasks and allowing you to have a greater focus on improving learner engagement and understanding.

See you next time!