AI-Written Lesson Plans?
Artificial Intelligence has a bad rap in popular culture as something that will take over the world (see: Skynet, Avengers movies etc). But current reality is much less obtuse than that.
Last year something called GPT-3 came out that was pretty revolutionary and even better, openly released. See the video below — but basically it uses massive amounts of trained text to predict what text should come next.
I’m developing a bit of a prototype ‘project’ on Github to quickly create quality, differentiated lesson plans on the fly. I see the value of this for new teachers or veterans looking for new ideas.
Why?
It is NOT to support only using ‘ai-created’ lessons. It is not to take away teacher autonomy, but rather enhance it. And it’s nowhere close to ‘done’.
Rather, as a teacher I often felt like I didn’t like the textbook lesson plans because they weren’t creative or deep enough. Finding and curating quality curriculum outside of that was difficult (it was why I left the classroom to join OpenEd in 2015). But I do see that if we can cut down the steps to create engaging and research-supported (read: input text) lessons it can help teachers focus on fine tuning not thinking of activities especially for digital scenarios.
Basic plan
As explained in the Readme:
I’ll import a few good lesson plans from SFUSD with proper sourcing and see if I can use services like GPT3, automatic translators etc to take the original text and create NEW lesson plans incorporating specific curricular supports on the fly for those populations.
eventually I’d want to be able to point to a google doc or a word file etc and have it generate lessons for various populations dynamically.
Right now all I’ve done is experiment with gathering some training text from places like Wikipedia to help fine-tune the model. But even without fine tuning, I entered a very small amount of text(in bold)around triangles and it created this:
It must know all of this from lesson plans it had documented online, but when I searched google for specific phrases and quotes I couldn’t find anything else out there.
My plans are to upload trained quality lesson plan supports and see how the output changes. I’m doing this just as a hobby and it may end soon if I can’t figure out how to get the text uploaded (when following the instructions I get stuck here when trying both the CURL and openai commands:
To sign up and try it yourself, go to beta.openai.com and there are several steps to get a key etc, but then you can go to the playground and just enter text and play with the variables.
