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In the growing age of Artificial intelligence (AI), technologies such as ChatGPT (generative pre-trained transformer) have the potential to revolutionise the education sector. ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool that can generate text from a given input and enables the creation of a variety of educational content, making a teacher’s life easier, which is imperative in a world where demands are continually increasing for teachers.
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So far, using ChatGPT, I have been able to:
Create reading texts that are suitable for the age and topic I am teaching
Create questions related to the texts that are created
Generate the answers in a defined table format to reduce my time finding them
Ask ChatGPT to act as a famous character from a book such as Harry Potter so that the children can ask ‘him’ a range of different questions
Support with creating vocabulary prompts when I’m running out of ideas
Give children feedback on sentence structure and grammar
Help me develop new ideas for ways to make a lesson more engaging
Paraphrase emails that don’t sound professional enough into something that is more suitable; this is particularly brilliant on a Friday afternoon when my brain is tired.
Gave me a rough outline of how to write this very statement
There are still so many avenues with my profession that ChatGPT could support which I haven’t explored yet. I have created a tutorial to support with using it if you want to explore it. Because time is saved by producing resources, this can allow educators to use repurpose time that would typically be set aside to create resources.
The use of ChatGPT in education also raises ethical considerations teachers must consider. When using ChatGPT to generate educational content, it is important to ensure that the generated text is accurate, reliable and appropriate, this must be proofread and verified. Additionally, there should be a process in place to ensure that the text is free from any bias, which can be a challenge to verify as it is hard to distinguish sources. The biggest lesson to learn with ChatGPT is that it is a tool and doesn’t replace educators and just like a house, it takes a builder and their knowledge to make a house, not just a hammer. Some teachers have raised concerns that ChatGPT will ultimately lead to teachers being replaced. While it can provide insight and clarity for learning much like a teacher, ChatGPT is unable to provide personal, emotional interaction, fostering relationships to mentor children towards a brighter future.
One of the biggest ethical concerns in the education community is the use of ChatGPT by students to produce quality answers to assignments without student input, reducing pupils’ independence. To address this, teachers need to work towards educating students about the potential of bias and copyright, supporting children to use ChatGPT as a tool to support assignment writing rather than doing it for them. Additionally, teachers can access some ChatGPT detectors to support understanding whether assignments are just copied and pasted. Ultimately, it is up to companies such as OpenAi (who created ChatGPT) to ensure that there is a footprint for content that is written by AI so that it is easier to detect.
In conclusion, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionise the educational sector by providing a faster and more efficient way to generate educational content, creating an exciting future for the educational landscape. However, its use must be coupled with appropriate ethical considerations to ensure that it does not have a negative impact on the learning experience. It is crucial that children become masters of the tools available to them, not just consumers of them. By teaching children how to use technology, not just how to use specific devices or programs, we are helping them to develop essential skills such as problem-solving, creativity, communication, and critical thinking.
Check out my upcoming training on how to maximise AI in Education below: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chatgpt-ai-for-teachers-tickets-545659862337
