ChatGPT and other AI services seemed to burst into popular usage out of nowhere in the past year or so.

I remember seeing AI art take off first: there was a controversy in a subreddit or two about an AI created artwork winning an art contest. Soon afterwards, I applied to be in the open beta to play with it. I got in, and made a new background for my phone, and was kind of excited to be able to make new images without much investment of skill on my part.

On my Instagram, the first prominent use I saw, was AI being used to read & compile a bunch of selfies of my friends and then to create fantastical reels of scenes and glamorous imagery of themselves.

And then of course, I began to see reports on teacher groups about students using AI to write essays and other assignments. This was my first exposure to ChatGPT and more text-based AI in my corner of the world. (Although I guess I saw a few posts about like chat-bots before this, but they didn’t seem world transforming at their current tech-level).

So anyways, I made an account and have started to explore it. In the teaching subreddit, one of the first discussions was about how we can ‘catch students plagiarizing’ when they’re using AI to do their work. I’m not sure how to address this yet, other than to say that we’ll probably need to reevaluate what we’re teaching and using to measure student success in schools. Similar to when Google became integrated into our lives and forward-thinking teachers began to reduce their emphasis on memorizing trivia pieces of information- AI will definitely mean redefining the goals of our educational system.

I like to make analogies with photography when I discuss this with teachers. Photography didn’t eliminate the need to teach students to paint realistic imagery in art classes, but it did provide a new way to create art and explore the world. It’s also, realistically, not something we can fight, so we should work to embrace it and figure out what new things we can do in this new reality.

Since then, I’ve considered ways I can use it as an educator: something that immediately came to mind was livening up my lesson plans by working with it to brainstorm new ideas for my kids. This has worked out as a personalized, free-version of Teachers Pay Teachers. I still have to spend time curating it, and editing down the lessons, but it’s really revitalizing my Sunday planning days. I had gotten into the groove of using the same activities year after year, but the efficiency that GPT brings is really helping me push some of my old lessons.

I think a big further use I’d like to explore might be to figure out how I can use GPT to create learning opportunities that never existed at all before.

In one of my first years as an educator, I pushed myself to do a lesson plan in which I walked into a classrom and declared that “I had built a time machine that would allow students to be penpals with individuals from the past”. I then put my students into groups of 3 or 4, and they wrote letters to someone living in the 1800s. The next day, the individual from the past wrote them back a personalized letter, responding directly to the questions and things they had written. It took some suspension of disbelief, but my 8th graders really loved this project. The person from History and the groups wrote back and forth over the course of a couple of weeks.

On the back-end, I was going home each night, and writing out a few blocks of generic text responses, and personalizing a few things (while copy and pasting a lot of the text between different responses I had written to each student-group’s letters). It took really long (honestly hours+), but it was the sort of fun, ridiculous lesson that I really enjoy as a teacher. It combined by DMing skills from Dungeons and Dragons with my creative writing skills, and my intense passion for teaching. It also really banked on the fact that I don’t have kids or a life at all, apparently.

These days? I’ll bet I could do that exact lesson, better, and spend only a few minutes each evening.

I honestly can’t wait to see what the future holds for teaching thanks to artificial intelligence. (Fingers crossed that this isn’t a leopards-ate-my-face moment and the answer will be “the future holds unemployment”).

Below: a lesson plan that I’ve already used with my kids. It was so fun! It’s not a really innovative lesson plan, but I didn’t have to write anything for it. I literally just put in, “Write me a fun arts integrated lesson plan for my students to finish off their First-Four-Presidents unit.” In less than 2 minutes, it spat out like 20 different ideas. It’s honestly such a time-saver. And this is barely scratching the surface.

Mastery Project 1: Presidential Debate Video

Objective: Students will demonstrate their understanding of the first four Presidents of the United States by creating a video debate between two of the Presidents.

Instructions:

1. Choose two of the first four Presidents of the United States – George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison.
2. Research the life and accomplishments of your chosen Presidents. You can use books, websites, or other reliable sources.
3. Write a script for a debate between the two Presidents, with each presenting their arguments and responding to questions.
4. Consider important issues and events that occurred during their terms, and use persuasive speaking techniques and factual evidence to support your arguments.
5. Record yourself presenting the debate, using a video recording device such as a smartphone or webcam.
6. Edit the video, including any necessary cuts or transitions, and adding visuals such as pictures or text to enhance the debate.
7. Submit the video in a digital format, along with a reflection on the process of creating the debate and what you learned about the two Presidents.

Note: You may choose to play the role of both Presidents in the debate, or you may enlist a friend or family member to play one of the roles. If enlisting someone else, be sure to credit them appropriately in your video and reflection.

Let me know if you have any other ideas! I’d love to try out new things for my middle schoolers.