Few areas have seen as much impact on AI as education, from students using ChatGPT to cheat to AI helping students research new technologies. While the pro and con AI debate continues, teachers can use AI to help plan and prepare lessons, and make the classroom more enjoyable.
1. Prevent Cheating
Many teachers’ first experience with AI is when a student submits an assignment created by a service like ChatGPT. How do you handle this? Some tools can try to recognize AI-generated work, but they are not always reliable, especially with the latest AI tools. Instead, many teachers choose to use the same approach as calculators: allow their use but make sure students understand the terms and limitations. Explain to students how AIs can be prone to hallucinations, creating missing sources and logical errors within created experiments. This can be avoided by studying and correcting the work, but it would be easier for the students to write that point themselves.
One teacher tells me that they get their students to review the feedback from ChatGPT, distinguishing between errors and mistakes. After that, they don’t try to use these tools to cheat. Instead, they use AI to do research and help but do the work themselves.
2. Show
AI isn’t some fancy technology: you can use it on devices you probably already have in your classroom. Computers as cheap as the $90 Raspberry Pi can run large-scale language models (LLMs) in place to let your students explore AI without worrying about who can access the results. There’s more to this than just talking: free and open-source tools like Prompt Mixer can help your students understand how AI works, how they can control the LLM, and what the results look like by tweaking the way they ask questions.
3. Mobile Teaching Assistant
A good teaching assistant can free up a teacher to focus on students who need a hand, and the non-profit education organization Khan Academy offers its Khanmigo AI teaching assistant to teachers for free. This AI assistant is versatile: it can write lesson plans, create multiple-choice questions, and help a busy teacher add a hook to their lessons. For example, I asked Khanmigo to come up with a hook for discussing leadership lessons from Moby Dick: He suggested that I start with the statement, “A good leader always puts the needs of his employees above his own desires,” and I suggested that the students should discuss if Ahab. he was a good leader. Spoilers: No.
4. Compare Good Historical Figures and Books
Do you want your students to better understand the motifs of figures such as Frankenstein’s monster or Achilles from the Iliad? HelloHistory.ai can help by using AI to create a chatbot based on historical and literary statistics. It should be used with caution: the site warns you to check the facts and reminds you that the chatbot may be biased. The free service is also limited to 20 responses. It’s a lot to start with, and it’s still an interesting way for the reader to explore the motivations of a huge range of people, over 400 from history, literature, and mythology from Hannah Arendt to Zeus.
5. Use AI-Generated Images as Writing Prompts
Nothing engages students like a funny picture of what you’re teaching. With the right information, free image production tools such as Microsoft CoPilot or Google’s new ImageFX can create fun and clever illustrations to start conversations or illustrate points. I did this with Google’s ImageFX with the prompt “Warren G Harding’s cartoon ‘Hardship teaches strength.’ He is holding a teapot, while a reporter wearing a fedora and carrying a notebook looks on skeptically. “
6. Automatically Summarize and Create a Lesson Plan from a YouTube Video
YouTube is full of great and informative content, from classic games like King Lear (with a wonderful performance by the recently departed James Earl Jones) to historical gems like this newsletter about the role of women in the workplace since 1963. , from summaries to discussion points and multiple choice questions for your students.
7. Leave them with a joke
If you want to end your course on a light note, ask AI to write a joke about your teaching topic. I asked Microsoft Copilot to make a joke about Mary Shelley Frankensteinand this came up: “Why did Dr. Frankenstein go to therapy? Because he had trouble making friends!” Well, it’s not a big joke, but they’ll probably remember it.
Source link
