How I’m using AI in teaching

I have such a weird relationship with AI.

If you’re not in the loop, you’ve probably not even heard of AI. Firstly: where have you been? Artificial Intelligence, consumed by the general public, took a massive leap forward last year, when ChatGPT took off. Since then, other AI software has been the focus of many companies’ and countries’ board room meetings, as they’ve tried more and more to integrate the technology into their existing products.

There are countless uses of this kind of technology but, in its simplest form, the AI that you and are most accustomed to are probably the ones that work off a simple prompt that you enter into a chat box.

In the blogosphere alone, it’s been used to generate post ideas, post outlines, and even entire blog posts. I know because I’ve dabbled with AI for all three types, ensuring that any AI-generated posts are injected with my unique voice prior to publishing. The trouble with this was that it never felt fully authentic. Instead, I now avoid spending hours thinking of what to write about and ask ChatGPT to do that instead, generating ideas around my three niches: Education, Lifestyle hacks and Productivity, and then writing the content myself.

Initially, I thought that writing posts using AI would save time, whereas in reality it only caused more headaches. If used responsibly, it’s a wonderful tool, but it can be quite dangerous if left unchecked. Some people have gained traction for their use of AI to write whole books, or to create ‘authentic’ Charlie and the Chocolate experiences, and this completely takes away any sense of autonomy we have as creators in the creative landscape. Aren’t we using AI to speed up the boring stuff to give us more time with the fun, creative opportunities in life?

To each their own. While I’ve not used AI to take over my blog, its found its greatest use in the classroom. It’s save me countless hours with preparing lessons and marking work. Keep reading to find out how.

How I use ChatGPT as a teacher

There are times, as a teacher, when you’re in the flow. I’m not talking about when doing the teaching – that part is always fun and you tend to get into the flow automatically if the lesson is going well.

What I’m talking about is the stuff that you do before and after the lesson. When it’s you, sat with a nice coffee, in front of a computer screen, getting ready to plan lessons and mark work. What if there were a way to speed up this process?

Turns out that there is.

I use ChatGPT as a teacher, and the first way is through simple knowledge checks. I’ve been teaching for four years, and so there is a lot that has become automatic knowledge to me. However, when I’m marking, there are occasionally dates that I can’t recall or figures that have slipped my mind. I might think, ‘Was Edward Jenner given £10,000 or £20,000 by the government to continue his work on vaccines?’

Knowing the exact date is important for practising exam technique. I could rifle through my own notes to find the answer, or I could ask Google. Quite often, the first solution takes too long and the second leads me to copious data across various websites where the authors do their best to keep me reading, exposing me to ads and generating passive income for their websites before giving me the answer.

Use in this way, ChatGPT acts like a search engine. It finds the answer for you. It warns you that it does make mistakes sometimes, so it’s important that you do check independent notes if you’re unsure on the correct answer. I wouldn’t personally advise using ChatGPT for knowledge I’m really unsure on. For that, I’ll use my own, personal, notes instead.

The second way that I’ve used ChatGPT is to write model answers. It’s a great service for generating very basic PEE paragraphs, which is the crux of good History writing, but not very good at providing synthesis or sustaining an overall argument. These factors are crucial to success, and so it’s important that you add this in before giving the essay to your students to analyse.

Or you could do what I’ve done before: ask students to check it over and identify what’s missing, and get them to add it in themselves. This is a great method for helping students reach those more elusive higher grades.

How I use QuestionWell as a teacher

I cannot put into words how useful QuestionWell has been in my work life. It’s a website by the makers of Kahoot, which you’ll know well if you’re a teacher or a recently-graduated student. It allows users to copy and paste any text from any website into a box, before generating up to 10 multiple choice questions.

There are other premium options available, as is the ability to create short-answer questions, but QuestionWell’s basic options have been great for creating comprehension or knowledge checks for students. The website works with Google to identify any similar, but incorrect, answers, and makes those for you too. I often find that creating realistic, fake, answers to throw students off is the hardest part, so the fact that this is done for me is brilliant. It goes without saying that you should check all of the questions before setting them, as the questions generated are sometimes repetitive or irrelevant.

I can then export the quiz as a Google Form. I can make multiple different Google Forms and combine them, which means that I can effectively bypass the website’s 1000-characters-per-box-to-generate-the-quiz limit. Finally, I can serve this to students as an exit ticket, starter or knowledge-check homework.

QuestionWell is a fantastic AI tool because it dramatically cuts down on the amount of things that I have to do which I’ll term ‘busy work’. It is work that has to be done to check students’ knowledge, but ultimately it doesn’t make a difference if I make this or not. Plus, because it’s self-marking, it’s going to drastically cut my work load, freeing up time to spend on work that can’t be self-marked – like extended writing, where students need my personalised feedback.