Tech To Do - ChatGPT: How are you going to use it?

Back in December I talked about AI and the opportunities it was going to provide.

It's time to revisit that and get real about how we can use it in the classroom.

For this Tech To Do, I challenge you to dive into it. 

Create a free account at Chat GPT while it's still in Beta form and start playing. If you're still not familiar with ChatGPT - according to itself "ChatGPT is an open-source language model developed by OpenAI, trained on a large corpus of text data to generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions and prompts." In plain English it's who you would call in the "phone a friend" option for Who Wants to be a Millionaire (totally just dated myself there)

ChatGPT is experiencing high levels of use, so you'll find that you can't always get a response, but it does eventually let you in.

While I know there is concern that students will use it to cheat, I think it's important to consider more extensive and appropriate use for the service. I would start by challenging you to enter some of your latest assignment prompts or discussion questions - everything from coding assignments to history prompts to science phenomena. 

You might use this to gauge authenticity and deeper learning of assignments and we might start considering ways to make summative assessment more performance based. 

I would also encourage you, while playing with it, to think about how you might use it to encourage deeper critical thinking. For example if ChatGPT generates a hypothesis for students, you might ask them to prove it wrong with evidence, or if it writes a thesis statement, you might ask them to use quotes from the text to support it.

Before you get into the implications it has for student created work - I would encourage you to use it to help alleviate some of the cognitive demand on your own work. You might have it write a draft email for you, draft a lesson plan, or explain things your stuck on.

Here are some ways that I have used ChatGPT in the last few weeks to help relieve some writer's block when it comes to lesson planning. 

First Grade: Reader's Theater

Last week in a meeting with first grade teachers we were trying to figure out a fun way to explain some of the principals of civics. Specifically we were considering how to explain rules and laws, civic virtues and civic based jobs. We spent some time trying to dig up a reader's theater that might serve as an introduction and saw that there were a few on TPT, but didn't go so far to buy it - because who knows what you're getting. 

On a whim, I typed the request into ChatGPT and asked it to write a Reader's Theater for 1st graders about Goldilocks on Trial for Breaking and Entering.

With a few additional requests, I was able to produce a 3 Act Reader's Theater that could introduce careers like: judge, lawyer, police, and terms like: law, verdict, jury, jury foreman, vote, community service, damages and more - all using characters and situations the kids would be familiar with.

I copied and pasted the transcript into a Google Doc and edited a bit - and it probably needs to be edited a bit more to simplify the language, but it's a start that took roughly 30 minutes to get into a document and edit that previously would have taken me days of brainstorming and hours to write. You can see that draft here.

Kindergarten: Decodable Readers and Kentucky History

The next day, with the success of this endeavor fresh in my mind, I met with a couple of Kindergarten teachers and we were talking about the difficulty in finding decodable readers that go along with the different letter combinations.

For example, I might ask it to write a decodable text for a kindergartner using CVC words and short A

While not Shakespearean here, this might provide a start if you have a mental block or are just overloaded with other tasks. Pop these sentences into Seesaw and add images from a Britannica image search, and you have your own text to share with students. You could even take it a step further and have them record them selves reading the text in Seesaw and highlighting the short a sound.

We also used the service in our meeting to have it explain the Kentucky Derby to a kindergartner. While our first try didn't get as much detail as we had hoped, we refined the request and it came back with a bit more.

I could see using the second text produced with primary source images for a lesson on a Kentucky tradition.

Third Grade - Global Interactions

Stuck on how to design a lesson for global forms of government to 3rd graders, I typed in this question:

The results were not terrible. I could see myself taking the instructions provided by the bot and maybe adapting them using Jamboard or Google Slides:

Instructions:

1. Divide the class into 5 groups, each group representing a different form of government.
2. Give each group a picture or illustration of the form of government they will be representing and jigsaw puzzle pieces with descriptions of key characteristics of that form of government.
3. Have each group put together their jigsaw puzzle and present their form of government and its key characteristics to the class.
4. After each presentation, have the class try to put all the pieces together to form a complete picture of all 5 forms of government.
5. Have a class discussion on the similarities and differences between each form of government and the pros and cons of each.
6. As a final activity, have each student write a paragraph explaining which form of government they think is best and why.

While those instructions could actually be put into a lesson plan and be ok - the assessment suggestion was limited.

Assessment:

• Observe students' participation during the activity
• Evaluate students' written paragraphs on their preferred form of government.

Of course, this lesson actually led me to ask:

Would my third grader get this? Yes. Would I need to add a bit more to really flesh this out for a jigsaw? Also, yes - but at least I'm not starting from scratch here.

If you're on TikTok - there's a lot of chatter about how to use ChatGPT - or whether or not it should be blocked. 

My current favorite creator is @gibsonishere. Check her out and watch her videos. You can see how her journey to understand ChatGPT has impacted her lesson planning and how she talks about writing with her students. It is really thought provoking and an amazing example of embracing the new and scary. Through her videos you can see her discover, brainstorm, implement, refine and reflect on use. What's even better is the reaction her students have had to the service and how they sometimes feel confined in self expression. Look out for her this week on a report by Lester Holt!

Are you Ready?

I'm hoping that was enough to get you curious enough to dive in and give it a try! If you're not sure and want to schedule some time to test it out and see other ways it might be useful to you I'm here to brainstorm and co-play - I mean co-plan.

If you have taken the ChatGPT dive - I would love to hear what you've done!