7 practical ways for teachers to use ChatGPT as a virtual assistant
The public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot may have signified a tipping point for Artificial Intelligence, leveraging the human-machine interaction to the level of collaboration. ChatGPT is a large language model that makes for a powerful, conversational chatbot, currently offered at zero cost. Even though it has not been developed for any specific industry, ChatGPT could apparently serve as a virtual assistant to teachers and students. This fact has in turn sparked discussions about personalized learning, academic honesty, and the future of assessment, in what seems to be a first-class disruption of education. After having “interviewed” ChatGPT about its potential use in K-12 education, I decided to share seven practical ways for teachers to use chatGPT as a virtual assistant including, among others, sample text prompts.
So what could ChatGPT do for a teacher?
1. Create summaries of curriculum concepts
ChatGPT can create content on-demand at different levels of difficulty. For example, the teacher could use the text prompt “explain thermal conduction” and specify the target group (“for 10th graders”, “for elementary school students”, or just “in simple terms”). Because of the conversational capacity of ChatGPT, the teacher could follow up to refine the initial request. The chatbot’s responses may include, among others, definitions, explanations, mathematical formulas with numerical applications, and real-world examples. The teacher could use the output to teach an unfamiliar topic, compile notes and revision guides, and even encourage students to use it as their own virtual assistant regarding concepts they need to improve their understanding of.
2. Create lecture notes and lesson plans
ChatGPT is not only capable of creating content, but also organizing it in ways familiar to the teacher. More specifically, it can be prompted to, e.g., “give lecture notes for a 20-min introduction to thermal conduction”, to respond with a few paragraphs of suggested text. Moreover, it can be asked to “give a 20-min. lesson plan about thermal conduction”, in which case the teacher may receive objectives, materials needed, and suggested (timed) warm-up activities, introduction to the concept, direct instruction, guided practice, and conclusion. Lecture notes and lesson plans could be then refined by the teachers themselves per needs, or serve as valuable guidance for inexperienced professionals.
3. Create assessments
ChatGPT is capable of creating assessment questions on demand such as multiple choice questions, short-response questions, data-based questions, exercises, etc. on a specified topic, and provide the teacher with suggested answers (“create four multiple choice questions to assess the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, and give me the correct answers”), who in turn needs to evaluate the chatbot’s suggestions. This could significantly reduce the teacher’s time commitment into creating assessment questions. Furthermore, ChatGPT can output questions to assess a list of learning objectives! The teacher could actually enumerate the questions to then ask the chatbot to output not only the questions with their respective answers, but also the number of the learning objective(s) assessed per question, or even create a question to assess multiple objectives (“… to assess learning objectives 3 and 5”). This can strengthen the link between intended curriculum and teaching practice, as well as allow teachers and curriculum specialists to apply learning analytics to reflect on the curriculum’s effectiveness and on students’ areas of strength and growth.
4. Grade student responses
Automated grading? Not yet… But we may be getting there! After having been suggested with a question to assess student understanding of thermal conduction, I asked ChatGPT to rate a certain “student’s” typed response from 1 (no understanding) to 10 (excellent understanding). The chatbot rated the given response (with a 6..) and elaborated. The benefits could be enormous in saving teachers’ time and increasing the meaningful-to-menial tasks ratio.
5. Suggest student projects
It does not come as a surprise that ChatGPT can outline student projects, given its capacity to generate “sensible” lecture notes, lesson plans, and assessments — see below the response to the prompt: “outline a two-week high school project on line equations and linear regression with real-world applications”. The response may include a brief scheme of to-dos, suggested assessment, and materials needed. The teacher could then ask for refinements, like rephrasing the outline to employ the design thinking methodology (example text prompt: “reorganize the steps by following the design thinking methodology’s phases”). Next, a rubric to assess the students could be requested. Given the challenges associated with the orchestration of project-based learning activities, as well as their important role in the education of the 21st century, chatbots like ChatGPT could empower teachers in overcoming “writer’s blocks” and spark curiosity and creativity!
6. Create a syllabus!
Just specify the subject (or combinations of) and any other important elements, sit back and enjoy! ChatGPT creates course descriptions, objectives, and outlines, assessment categories, prerequisites, and related readings. Impressive? Still, special attention needs to be given to the quality of the chatbot’s output, as syllabuses correspond to broad knowledge areas. In a creative twist, teachers (and curriculum/educational leaders) could experiment with interdisciplinary subject blends including uncommon ones (“create a syllabus of a semester course combining artificial intelligence, history, and chemistry”), even though ChatGPT might provide the user with topics that might not blend well together.
7. Support lab investigations
That one surprised me: ChatGPT can create instructions for the conduction of science labs given a list of equipment and instruments (“Create instructions for a lab that would make use of some of the following equipment and materials: thermometer, 200 mL beaker, ice cubes, heating source, oxygen sensor, inclined plane, salt”), and respond to teacher follow-up questions about safety guidelines relevant to the specific lab, assessment of the safety risks associated with each lab conduction step, scoring rubrics, and even exemplar lab reports to document the student’s work.
Are we ready?
A teacher having a powerful, conversational text generator such as ChatGPT at their fingertips does not necessarily equal a smooth evolution to higher efficiency. Factors such as the teacher’s understanding of AI, obtained literacies (media; technology; data;), and dispositions towards technology, as well as the educational leaders’ and policy-makers’ corresponding competencies, will play an important role on what we do next. As students are already asking ChatGPT to write essays for them, an urgent discussion is needed about the meaning of education, and ethics, in what seems to be a “Sputnik” moment for teaching and learning.
