As the new school year begins, I think of “Friday Night Lights” and the excitement of the band playing while the home football team rushes out to rousing applause. School openings are exhilarating, but they can also feel overwhelming. Any solutions I can use to economize my time and free up for more direct contact with students and staff in classrooms are too important to overlook.
My endless list of mundane tasks and needs to open my school feels daunting. New tech solutions like AI are not the cure-all. Yet I can’t pass up having more time to improve learning and teaching by offloading trivial administrative tasks, or “administrivia,” and enlisting AI. There are reasons to be cautious about the remarkably imperfect productivity of AI, so understanding the benefits while using AI is a practical approach.
The following resources include a tool, an example of their use and cautions to consider. This is far from an exhaustive list, but you will come away with a few new methods to help offload tedious and labor-intensive tasks to an AI tool and improve the real work of improving learning and teaching.
Prompt ideas for AI chatbots
Make use of an AI chatbot to engage students in engaging ways. Leverage the power of a chatbot’s understanding of known figures to capture students’ attention. For example, if you are teaching a science lesson on the parts of a cell, why not enlist the services of none other than … Yoda?
Within the chatbot, write “I am a sixth-grade student who needs to learn all about cells and their parts. Teach me in the voice of Yoda and respond to my follow-up questions.”
The teacher can provide a list of guide questions such as, “Why are mitochondria often called the powerhouses of the cell?”
Yoda’s response: Powerhouses of the cell, mitochondria are called, yes. Energy, they produce, like little engines they work.
You can do this for any character a student is interested in, ideally from a vetted list by the teacher. The chatbot will take on the assigned persona, and the interaction will be ongoing with the character’s tone and delivery. Your students will thank you because it’s a nice break from worksheets — and eye-rolling will diminish.
Caution: A typical chatbot may occasionally provide imprecise responses, so students and their teachers should monitor this for accuracy.
AI tools for research
Challenges often associated with AI as a learning resource include bias in the results and, worse, inaccurate information. AI can even hallucinate content, something a lawyer learned the hard way when he cited made-up cases in court. How do we ensure that fast and powerful results are accurate? Let’s examine two tools.
Perplexity. You may have heard of this AI tool and the millions of dollars Jeff Bezos from Amazon invested in it. A significant advantage of Perplexity AI is how it shares results. By including footnotes with links to the sources in prompt responses, a user can check sources for fidelity.
Caution: While some may be considered reliable, be mindful that perplexity does not differentiate these from less reliable sources. Consider that a response may include a scholarly journal, right alongside a Reddit or blog post.
There is a way around this. Within the prompt, simply ask for your results to only include scholarly journals. For example, type this into the prompt: “Why does bullying peak in middle school? Only provide me answers from scholarly journals.”
Elicit. A number of AI resources are dedicated exclusively to providing reliable research-referenced sources.
Caution: Be mindful that the generative answer is designed to respond to your question.
While it includes sources, the timeless advice to check those sources stands. Reinforcing this adds to the lessons learned about researching properly and accurately.
Image generators
There are a growing number of these in varying quality. I am not partial to anyone, but I prefer to demonstrate with the image generator from Meta.ai. As you shape your prompt, it changes in full view in real time. The image almost appears as a claymation construction as it develops.
Disclaimer: You have to have a Facebook or Instagram account to access meta.ai.
Image generators are great for students composing presentations and teachers looking to add visuals to their own lesson presentations. They are also free of copyright infringement.
Go to Meta.ai. If this is your first time, you will be prompted to sign into Facebook or Instagram.
In the prompt box, type “imagine,” and then the image you desire. For example, I typed in: Imagine a principal going down a slide. The image shapeshifted as I added descriptors, such as when I added students. Suddenly, a group of happy students popped up.
Caution, AI image generation can show bias. I wrote about this last year and haven’t observed a satisfactory improvement from this. All of the principals were white men.
Check out my article on biases in AI and how to navigate around such biases.
Other AI tools
- YouTube videos are great media tools to support teaching and learning, and I recently wrote this article on companion YouTube AI tools that make using them even more impressive.
- Form feedback is tremendous because qualitative feedback is possible when applying responses to a chatbot, as I explain in this article. Gone are the days of surface feedback from Likert scales. Using AI, I show you how you can dive into qualitative feedback quickly and effectively and use that feedback to improve your school or classroom.
Outsmart “administrivia”
All these tools and ideas are worth considering when you look to improve teaching and learning. I know that’s my core principle in leading my school. Try these ideas and feel liberated from the mundane “administrivia” so you can be a more effective educator.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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