By Maria-Nefeli Andredaki,
Raise your hand if you have been in an academic environment where the educator has expressed disgust, hatred, fear, or just misinformation about the use of AI for educational purposes. Best believe that my own hand is up and waving!
When ChatGPT made its groundbreaking debut a few months ago, teachers and students had already been familiarized with what it means to have online lessons and rely on technology a bit too much. And hey, I get it, exams were often turned into circus shows and teachers/professors worked extra hard to ensure (sometimes with no success) that they were conducted in a fair and appropriate manner. However, wouldn’t it be great if educators stopped seeing AI tools as a threat if they stopped antagonizing them and instead learned how to use them in order to improve the quality of their lessons even further?
According to Nik Peachy, Director of Pedagogy at Peachey Publications and British Council Innovations winner, AI tools can create lesson materials, help students work autonomously by providing feedback, and answer many of their frequent questions, relieving some of the teachers’ workload.
Here are some ways in which AI tools can be used inside the classroom:
From my own personal experience as a language teacher, Suno AI has been immensely helpful in making my lessons fun and entertaining. More specifically, Suno AI uses prompts to create songs! From fun, upbeat children’s songs about school supplies to slow or punk rock melodies with lyrics about the environment, this tool allows you to create the perfect song for each and every one of your lessons. It is better if the prompt you submit is as detailed as possible so that you receive the best results as soon as you can; one of the tool’s limitations is that you can only create five songs per day unless you pay for a subscription.
To give you an example, one of the prompts I came up with recently was the following: A fun, upbeat children’s song about pollination. The children’s CEFR level is A2 and they are 10 years old. The result was fantastic and my internship mentor was very excited about me using it in one of her environmental lessons! For further instructions on how to best use this tool, there are plenty of videos on YouTube that will not disappoint you!
If you need a tool to create and find lesson plans, then LessonUp is your solution! It is important to note that after the free-month trial is over, you have to pay a subscription to use it, but you might soon realize that it may just be worth it, depending on your teaching needs. LessonUp is a great platform for designing lesson plans for all kinds of subjects, starting by choosing the duration, grade level, and topic. There is also a feature that is ideal for new teachers, which allows you to structure the plan according to learning phases, such as preparation and evaluation. The LessonUp platform caters to students as well; there is a students’ perspective mode that the students can access through their own devices and answer questions/do activities during the presentation of the lesson plan. This means that the lesson plan is not just a personal document that the teacher uses as an authority to guide the lesson. Instead, it becomes a literal presentation and real-time guide that the students can use, interact with and enrich.
On the same note, ChatGPT can be used to give ideas and inspiration for lesson plans. Anyone can easily submit a prompt like “create a lesson plan about recycling. The students’ CEFR level is B1” and enrich it, depending on the results and the students’ needs. Apart from lesson planning, ChatGPT can be very helpful with creating writing exercises/prompts to be used in activities and exams, or even small stories for reading exercises. I once wanted to teach my class how to write dialogues, so I created a small story on ChatGPT about two friends playing and asked them to write the dialogue that could have taken place between these two characters. It is worth mentioning that most times-if not always- I edit all the material that ChatGPT comes up with, just to be more certain of their appropriateness for my students’ learning needs and interests.
In my personal opinion, the products of AI tools should be edited by the educator, while said educator also acknowledges and clearly states how and where they were created. Remember that just because you alter the material, the source does not change and should be credited! Hopefully, this will inspire some of you to use and search AI tools, as well as view them in a more positive light.
References
- How to Create Lessons & Teach with LessonUp | LessonUp Tutorial for Teachers. Youtube. Available here
- AI writing tools and education: what teachers need to know in 2023. Pearson. Available here
