Teacher Prepping with Generative AI

This weekend I had the privilege of attending Edcamp Gigcity where I gave a presentation on generative AI. Due to the nature of the ever-evolving topic, I didn’t even start prepping my presentation until Tuesday. And not surprisingly, by Thursday I needed to add 3 more slides due to coming off the wait list for Bard and the fact that ChatGPT now surfs the internet.

A few months ago I created a website (bit.ly//EducationalFuturist) just to collect my thoughts and curate my learning about generative AI and it’s influence on education. I normally just blog in order to do this, but there was just so much to unpack!

As I was trying to create my presentation to share with educators on Saturday, the fact I only had 30 minutes felt overwhelming. I quickly decided I would give my audience voice and choice and personalize the presentation to what they wanted. So there were 3 choices:

• Give me examples for my classroom
• The pros and cons of AI
• Combo

One of the major things I believe generative AI does for every industry is create efficiencies. Teachers agree that personalized learning has great benefit for students, but they also know that it seems like an impossible goal to meet the individualized needs of all their students. So I modeled it somewhat.

For the concept of “Give me examples” I created a prompt in GPT-4 asking for a lesson plan that would do that. I then copy and pasted the concepts to my Google Slides, made some adjustments to the topics, made it pretty and POOF. Done.

For the concept of “Pros and Cons,” I went to Curipod and did basically the same thing. Curipod is amazing! The engagement with this platform is spot on. If I were a k12 teacher I would be willing to pay out of pocket for this platform! I then went into the Curipod slidedeck editing some slides, added a few slides and POOF. Done.

Lastly, I opened Teachology.ai and created a prompt that would allow me to discuss useful ways to use generative AI in the classroom and also the ethical issues. I did some copy and pasting, some editing, and some aesthetic changes and POOF. Done.

What would have taken me hours and hours to prepare, took about 1–2 hours. That is my normal time to create a presentation when I am speaking at educational conferences- but basically I had 3 presentations in one.

Key things I took away from this:

• Your output is only as meaningful as the prompts you begin with. No shock here. The more I wrote prompts, the better I became at receiving meaningful answers. Remember when we were all learning how to use Google searches? Same concept.
• Not all platforms are created equally but all can be a good jumping off spot for teachers to add their own spin and knowledge. If you noticed above, I didn’t accept a single platform’s information totally. I adjusted each to best meet my goals.
• Your prompts are only as good as your background knowledge on the subject. It might take several tries to finally get to all the information you are looking for when you use generative AI based on what you already know. I told the attendees of my session that I believe the future of education will be teaching students how to be curators of information. I stand by this. Information is more readily available in useable form than ever before. It opens the door for us to take education towards more creation and connection because curation and consumption are truly becoming tools in the 4C tech integration toolbox.
• We are on the cusp of educational disruption. Personalizing lessons based on how students can connect the dots back to themselves (nod to Pam Inabinett’s session “Discovery Ed Strategies”) will be the only way we can know if learning is truly happening. The days of technical writing of a paper on a certain topic without connecting it to themselves can be done in about 7 seconds. If we accept this as a natural progression of life, we can then focus on “what’s next” in preparing students for their future.
• The roles of creativity and originality will be applauded more and more. Skilled craftsmen and subject matter experts will be more impressive to our humanity due to this. We can all know just enough on any subject to be dangerous (or helpful), but I believe those who show themselves as different will be highlighted more as humanity progresses.
• I can continue to come up with solutions to teach the way I’ve always taught in the face of AI, but AI is always going to be one step away from making that solution obsolete. For instance, when ChatGPT first came out, I suggested teachers tie writing assignments to current day events — a compare and contrast type of thing. “Pick an article from the news about something that happened in Ukraine this week and compare it to World War II.” This worked because ChatGPT’s data source stopped in 2021, until it didn’t this past week.
• I also predict that the open API of chatGPT (whisper) will make data less of a 4-letter word in education. This past week we saw how the platform Canva, that we all know and love, is now generative AI-enabled. We will see more of the platforms we use utilize this tool for our benefit. Imagine going into a edtech program you use regularly and looking at the dashboard and asking it “how many days did this student miss school this week. Which days? Which concepts did they miss on those days? Give me three resources to assign them based on this information.” POOF. “How long did the student interact with this information? What questions did they ask ChatGPT while interacting with this assignment? What are the learning gaps that this student still has?” POOF.
• I tend to be an educational futurist- a dreamer of what education could be. I’m excited about the possibilities but also a little intimidated by my ability to harness all this goodness well. Tally ho! Onward and upward! Hold on, here we go!